October 2016 – Kerberized: A Mac Administration and General Security Blog

Introduction to Regular Expressions (Regex)

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Josh Posted in Guides Leave a comment

This next subject might seem a bit obscure, but I promise you, this guide will benefit you significantly if you work in IT/Security long enough. I’m going to be discussing what is usually referred to as a regular expression, or regex. Regex is a very powerful way to search through massive text files for exactly what you need. The problem is, it looks like gibberish until you know exactly how it works.

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Fixing Slow SMB Speeds in OSX

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Josh Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment

After recently upgrading to OS X 10.12, I noticed some SMB file transfers were taking a lot longer than usual. Instead of the normal 100MB/sec transfer speeds I typically see between my Mac Mini and my Synology NAS on a gigabit (wired) network, I was seeing something closer to 30MB/sec.

Turns out I’m not the only one with this issue. Searching Google for “10.12 slow smb” returns pages full of results of people reporting the same issue. Most of them say “switch to AFP and the problem goes away.” That’s nice but I specifically use SMB because I have a share that’s accessed by Linux, Mac, and Windows – and so SMB is the right solution to keep file naming consistent.

The issue seems to come down to Apple’s SMB forcing default enabling of “client signing” which ruins performance. Continue reading →

The Basics of Cryptography

Posted on October 7, 2016 by Josh Posted in Security Leave a comment

With the nearly constant flood of data breaches that we read about almost every day, I thought I would take some time to cover the basic cryptographic techniques out there. I have avoided this so far because it is a rather difficult subject to explain without immediately going over many people’s heads. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that everyone, not just those using it on a daily basis, needs to understand just how encryption works. Continue reading →