Tiernan's Comms Closet December 2012

Send Emails as a Distribution Group in Office365

December 20, 2012 tiernano

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I am in the process of moving my Email domains from one Office365 plan (a Professional) to an Enterprise Plan. During the move, i set up some Email Aliases for older email addresses, which are still being used, but i dont send a lot of email from. But if i do need to send emails from these addresses, with the help of Powershell, I managed to set it up. The full details are listed on “how to send as an alias in Office 365”. It works perfectly! And, as a bit of shamless self promotion, if you are interested in Office365, why not drop me a mail at Tiernan at LimitedSlipNetworks dot com and i can set you up with a trial and more information.

IPv6 Firewall rules for MikroTik RouterOS

December 20, 2012 tiernano

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After yesterday’s post on IPv6 Networking in the house, I realized that all machines internally had publically facing IPv6 addresses! I started to panic, then went looking online, and found the following script:

This script, when run on your RouterOS board, will allow Established and Related connections, allow outgoing connections, and drop anything incoming that has not been requested… so, now everything inside the network should be more secured… I am new to this IPv6 stuff, so I am still learning… but, i am getting there…

IPv6 + MikroTik + Linux + Windows

December 19, 2012 tiernano

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I have been wanting to setup an IPv6 network for a while now, but never had the hardware or network to support it. My broadband Modem, a Cisco EPC3925, was pretty useless… But with the advent of Bridging on the Cisco EPC3925 it now works!

The first thing i needed to do was setup a Tunnel Broker Account with Hurricane Electric. I got a /64 block of IPv6 addresses, which should do me for a while… 🙂

Next, I followed the config example from the MikroTik Wiki Page: My First IPv6 Network. In my case, i only ran though most of router 1’s config, and did not create the “routing between segments” and “ospv-v3” backbone… I did give my internal LAN port an IPv6 address, as well as an IPv4 address.

Next, on my Windows Server machine, i gave it a static IPv6 address (since i dont have an IPv6 DHCP setup… yet…) and told it to use the IPv6 address i gave the RouteBoard as its gateway. Then i told it to use the OpenDNS public IPv6 address. I then visited IPv6 Test and Google’s IPv6 page to confirm connectivity… SUCCESS!!!

On my Linux box, I followed Soflayer’s Adding an IPv6 IP tutorial.

So far, so good…

Compressing and UnCompressing Protobuf items in C#

December 12, 2012 tiernano

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Part of a project i am working on required sending large amounts of data between different instances. To get this to work efficially, we started using the ProtoBuf using ProtoBuf-net in .NET. but the files where still quite large (17mb, give or take). So, we looked into compression…

here is some examples of how we managed to compress the protobuf files. We got some decient compression: 3mb files, down from 17mb. very happy.

to compress an object (obj) and write to a temp file (tmpfile):

to decompress the object back to a known type:

GIT tips and tricks

December 5, 2012 tiernano

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I use GIT a lot for different things, including this blog. so, here are a few tips and tricks i have found useful over the while…

Using Dropbox as a local GIT/Mercurial Repository: my own post from a while back.
Twelve GIT curated Tips and Workflows from the Trenches
Using GIT with Subversion: tips that will make your life easier: The office has an SVN server, but i like GIT. This doc, with the help of git-svn and this post on StackOverflow allows me to use GIT locally, and then push to SVN.
25 tips for intermediate git users
git ready: learn git one commit at a time
A few git tips you dont already know
The ProGIT book (paperback amazon) or Kindle Edition. Also available online