A part of my day job involves managing various servers and web services. There was a time that dealing with DDoS attacks was a mega stressful event that could last from hours to days. It generally involved waking up to the boss or team members or automated alarms messaging me about dead services, followed by — Continue reading »
Did Elon Musk Suspend My Twitter App?
📆 May 21, 2023
This blog runs on WordPress and, as evident, it’s updated infrequently, like one or two new posts per month. There are only a handful of plugins installed on it and one is used to auto-submit new posts to my low-activity Twitter account, @hashemian. In fact, the only activity on my Twitter account is the new — Continue reading »
Installing My Own Internet Cable Modem and Router
📆 March 24, 2022
If you are a cable modem customer in the US, in many cases your ISP company has provided you with the equipment to connect to the Internet and most likely you are paying a monthly equipment fee for that privilege. In many cases you can buy and use your own equipment and save the monthly — Continue reading »
Migrating To Cloud, Digital Ocean, Cloudflare
📆 July 22, 2021
When I started this site decades ago, I followed the usual path at that time to launch sites, shared hosting. There were many vendors to choose from but nothing like the quantity and diversity of what’s available today. I registered the domain, settled on a small vendor for $5/month, got my cPanel and terminal login — Continue reading »
Does It Make Sense To Self-Host Mail Server?
📆 April 22, 2020
I have operated hashemian.com for over 2 decades now, earlier on hosted servers and eventually on my own server. During that time the domain has also been email capable, accepting and delivering emails sent to/from addresses such as [email protected]. This was also originally hosted but was eventually ported to my own server. The product of — Continue reading »
Dabbling in IPv6
📆 January 11, 2019
Nowadays many people know of IP addresses. Those 4 numbers (technically known as octets) separated by dots (e.g. 173.162.146.61) which connect all of our devices to the Internet and allow them to find each other. Of course many don't understand the underlying technologies that make the whole thing work and they don't really need to — Continue reading »
The GDPR Mess
📆 June 8, 2018
With GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) being in full force since May 25, 2018, one must assume that the privacy and security of users are now fully protected. I think it’s an understatement to call that claim an over-exaggeration. GDPR is a European regulation designed to protect the privacy of European citizens, giving them full — Continue reading »
The WHOIS Data Block
📆 October 22, 2017
The WHOIS service is almost as old as the modern Internet. When you register a domain name, ICANN requires the domain registrar to collect the contact information of the domain holder and make that publicly available. There are a number of sites online that let users query the WHOIS database for various domain names. This — Continue reading »
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