Posts Tagged ‘dns’

.local CNAME Queries Failing on OS X 10.6.5

I was helping my sister with an issue with connecting to her school’s email server from her MacBook last night and discovered something interesting. Her school uses a webmail.domain.com address for the front end for OWA which is just a CNAME to its real address – a .local address. This all worked fine until a few weeks or so ago – we later pieced together that that’s when she upgraded to 10.6.5.

It seems that in 10.6.5, OS X can’t follow that CNAME for some reason. I could ping the .local address just fine and the browser connected just fine, but when I tried to use the .com CNAME’d hostname, it would fail. The kicker? The dig utility seems to ignore all of this madness which made it lie to me, and that did not help at all while troubleshooting.

I was able to find an Apple forum thread about this with someone saying that rolling back the mDNS binaries to those shipped with 10.6.4 seemed to fix it, but it didn’t help in my case (and some others in the thread). I personally don’t use anything at work or at home using the .local domain, but I hope this gets fixed soon as it breaks a lot of Microsoft-centric networks as a lot tend to use .local for one reason or another..

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Dec 7th, 2010

American Airlines Fiasco Could Lead to Other Attacks

The Google/Sun-Sentinel/United Airlines fiasco earlier this week seems to just reiterate to me the one basic flaw of most Internet-based systems: computers trust other computers far too easily. Now, the person passing the story on to Bloomberg definitely had some issues with thoroughness, however I suspect most of that process is automated. The fact that the Google bot didn’t find a date on the page so it automatically assumed the news was new seems to point to a deeper flaw in the way we network our systems. Whether or not the problem was malicious or purely accidental, malicious attempts to cause damage like this are sure to follow. Using flaws in BGP that were disclosed at the recent DEFCON conference, an attack on an organization like this by editing news on major news sites. Obviously, the BGP issue is a much larger issue than this, but this definitely could add a new twist to the problem. With other recent security flaws surrounding another core networking service on the Internet, DNS, it makes me wonder how close we are to a much larger, coordinated attack like this. Perhaps the world won’t require a larger wake-up call than this before issues of trust are addressed, but not a lot has been said about the BGP issue since DEFCON on the mainstream media. Things looked positive as the DNS vendors all worked together to patch the latest DNS source port flaw. With real war being waged on the cyber front such as the Russian attacks on Georga over the web this year, these issues have to be of major concern to governments around the world.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 11th, 2008