Category: Security

AZ Republican Tea Party

In a repost of the blog I did in 2015 when Diane Douglas was elected to the head the Arizona Department of Education, I discuss the nature of the effort to reduce government by the TEA party. This epistle is to refresh your memory, connect some dots, and continue to spur you on to vote in ALL elections.

The Arizona Republican party has been hijacked by the TEA party members to the point that good, responsible, long-standing Republicans are leaving the party. Party actions like censure and voting individuals out are now commonplace. A responsible moderate Republican has no where to go for party support.

The reason I am bring this up is that in the six years since we were so badly hurt by Diane Douglas’s TEA party, we may have relaxed and forgotten. The effort required to remove her, the time lost, and the tragic losses schools and students received from that incompetent cannot be forgotten.

Most people have no idea how complicated school finance is. Arizona residents pay taxes to the state and federal revenue departments. In Arizona the school district taxes on your property levied by the school districts DO NOT all make it to the schools the taxpayer sees on the tax bill. The game at the copper dome is to mix that state income into the General Fund so that it can disappear administratively. The money we thought got to the school is winnowed down to much less.

TEA party members do not want this or any other taxing. Public education is under the crosshairs of these ax handlers who for the most part starve public education and have no one in the public education system they would advocate for. Retirees along the Colorado river who want the governments checks are also the ones unwilling to support their state civically. The lead of the Arizona Republican party is such an individual who arrived here from West Virginia and has actively lead the TEA party devastation, the “stop the steal” anti-American activity, and saw to it that dialog in the caucuses was extinguished.

Lately I have watched the bogus “audit” of the last election foisted on the voters of Arizona by this same group of individuals. It cost us millions, broke the chain of custody of the ballots, threatened and injured Elections staff, and broke the voting machines. No miscount of the ballots was found. When we got to the US congressional meetings on this activity, we got to see Gosar, and Biggs carry on the lies and destructive monologue of streaming dog whistles now familiar to the educated and informed voters of Arizona.

The previous incompetent president, purported to be a savvy businessman who many of theses off-base dolts seem to love, is not far from many States Attorneys and the Federal Department of Justice taking him to task for criminal activities, treasonous activities, illegal nepotistic activities, gross financial misconduct, tax evasion by fraudulent means, and profiteering at the American voter’s expense.

All the while these same TEA party members and their kindred leadership of the Arizona Republican party have incited the masses to believe a grand conspiracy is afoot. It is apparent that the previous incompetent president did have a genius for spreading lies by way of the “liar’s dividend”. This has been emulated by every one of the now despotic leaders of the Republican party in Arizona. They divide, demean, spread falsehoods, abandon fact, lie, obfuscate, redirect and carry on.

FACTS

Joe Biden won the presidential election in 2020.

The DOJ is busy working on the previous incompetent’s law breaking.

Twelve States Attorneys General are after the same guy our Arizona Republican party leadership worships.

The present 2021 Arizona Republican party leadership continues to serve the previous incompetent’s lies.

Bernard Lambert – November 19, 2021

NANOG > NewNANOG

November 11, 2021 – Bernard Lambert

The North American Network Operators Group originally came out of Merit University as a function of network study and research. I always found it handy to track Internet core transit problems and solutions. It began over thirty years ago. You can join NANOG lists at https://www.nanog.org/resources/nanog-mailing-list/nanog-mailing-lists/

Back in February 2011 – https://www.merit.edu/news/new-agreement-transfers-nanog-trademark-and-resources/

At this seclists.org you can read all the listserve messages that come from them up to today as well as a wealth of other network operating and security lists. They keep all the messages nicely indexed so you can see what is going on or has gone on in the past.

Another resource for you may be the http://readlist.com lists archives.

Bernard Lambert – November 11, 2021

Your Favorite Monitoring Tool

Network and system gurus I am searching for your favorite tools. Please indicate the most used tool you use in your networked enterprise to do things like monitor addresses, desktops, virtual systems, physical nodes, or network performance.

Please rate the tool 1 (poor) to 3 (best)

Select the cost of your favorite tool.

The Job I Want

With the decades of experience that I have, it is hard to find a contract to perform network or systems work that commands $85 an hour. Please consider these things prior to contacting me:

  • No third party recruiters.
  • All work is contracted either W2 or 1099.
  • Remote work is the only type desired.
  • Equipment can be provided, leased, or sold to customer.
  • All monitoring activities available:
  • zabbix, SolarWinds, Netscout, SOC, NOC, ISE, pandora
  • Firewalls and Load Balancers
  • Palo Alto, F5, Cisco, Checkpoint
  • Scripting bash, powershell, python, ansible, chef, puppet, etc.
  • Orchestration Salt, Ansible, Kubernetes
  • Cloud, hybrid, and captive enterprise systems and networking capable.

Please send your inquiries to System Wrights:

The Forces of Insecurity

Bernard Lambert September 13, 2021

IT security is in a revolution via the present-day challenges and how they are overcome. Some idea of the future is the speculation that follows.

We are presently countering invasions of the communications systems, the destinations along their routes, the systems at any of those destinations, and theft of the information in those systems. It is a vigil. The most often mistake made toward guarding against these things is to “bolt-on” some device or system and let it do the work. The vigil is left to the robots to alert you when things go awry. A most recent hack even invaded the very systems used to do such monitoring.

We are reacting to such things and not being proactive. High grade, high paid help is not employed here. A NOC or SOC is set up where the labor is cheap and fingers crossed; things won’t go wrong. Because of specialization in applications, systems, and networking individuals seldom have the combined talents necessary and are willing to work for much less compensation. The worst I have seen it is for the 150 monitoring systems in a global enterprise dropping from sight without anyone knowing for a long time.

workThat instance was easily remedied with robots to watch the robots along with continuous visual feeds to the NOC and enterprise management personnel. The vigil was reintroduced and easily used. What can stump everyone after such systems begin a cascade of information coming your way, is the sheer volume of the info stream and the adverse effect it has upon the operators of the NOC or SOC. One cannot keep up with the avalanche of data. This is a self-induced attack.

In all cases, the staffing headcount requirement has been woefully inadequate once problems arose. The “averaging” done on personnel cost neglects the real need in a real crisis. Because these happen in an instant an organization cannot react in a timely fashion with such short staffing. Problems are not “headed off”. Some are postponed to a future project. The response is thus untimely.

My recommendation is to establish a broad-based knowledge team to install and operate this vigil in a distributed fashion. You can use a cloud, do a hybrid, or build a data center. The team you hire to do the systems, application, networking, virtualization, cloud security, and compliance issues must have integration experience and integration skills. Yes, pay the man or woman more than fifty-five an hour.

What is your experience??

Real Is NOT!

The sacrifices made by everyone repelling the insurrection the ex-president fomented have gone unnoticed. We did get to see Officer Sicknick’s memorial. Many politicos were in attendance. The news tried to give it a solemn treatment. I did not get a feeling in the last weeks that the followers of the insurrectionist have any concern for life, our government, or the citizens of our country.

Nor have I seen any of the most fervent of the followers show remorse for the loss of life, the damage to the capitol, or the damage to the American spirit. The selfish and self-serving rationale that is prevalent among those insurrectionists is that their leader and their way of life has been stolen. The conspiracy theory driving that lust is a complete unrelenting lie provided by and continuously fueled by the ex-president. They are not driven by truth but by suspicion.

The last time we as a country got into killing each other so openly was during the time we worked to shed ourselves of slavery. That too spilled over into the killing of leaders. Abraham Lincoln was killed by the same kind of despot as killed Officer Sicknick. The ex-president’s pursuit of the damn lie is apparently to feed his ego and wallet (campaign funds) while trying to reform power in the Republican party. The Republican party cannot make up its mind to condemn the actions of the former president.

The worse thing in this is the state-level hooliganry being conducted by our errant Republicans like Ward, Biggs, Gosar, and Lesko. They lost, they will not admit it, and they are going about the business of restricting ballot access at every turn now that an election has proven their coward ex-president is unwanted.

Arizona Republican leadership is cowardly, xenophobic, racist, and does not represent moderates in the party. They still believe there will be a Mexican invasion of Arizona. They may be uninformed about the fact that those races and religions were here before the eastern immigrants showed up. They are cowards given their lack of concern for the citizens of Arizona.

Backing the craziness of the previous administration is a testament to our Republican leaders’ ignorance, lack of concern for their constituents, party loyalty beyond reason, damage to the residents of Arizona and the United States, and disregard for the law.

For several decades we in Arizona have taken issues to the ballot in order to get the most fundamental of issues resolved because our legislature is working their personal agendas and the citizen’s needs go for want. Arizona’s legislative process is unamerican as a process. Their legislative product is unwanted by the masses.

So in summary a profoundly ignorant hillbilly from West Virginia runs the Republican party. She is actually an insult to my kin back there in West Virginia. A lottery winner represent a small enclave of religious conservatives, and the rest endorse the errant behavior of the ex-president. All have worked very hard to limit poll access and voter registration.

The methods of party politics has changed in my lifetime in that constituent needs are now secondary to the bent to devolve, diminish, ruin, gut, and change the laws and policies of the state and nation to further their hidden agendas.

One need only follow the money to see what we get is what the lobbyists have paid for by way of “campaign donations” to Senators and Representatives. This is true in state and national elections and campaigns

Forget not what has transpired. We have to wait two years for the next election cleanup.

Bernard Lambert February 3, 2021