Simmons Consulting

Blocking AzureCloud due to malicious traffic

I haven’t posted in a long time but I felt the need to mention this to anyone else who might need to consider it. There has been a significant uptick in malicious traffic to my website over the last few months and I decided to do some analysis of from where it is coming. A huge source of these probes (looking through logs there are hundreds and hundreds of 404s that seem to be looking for vulnerable software) are Microsoft IP addresses. Digging around, it turns out they seem to be Azure VPS instances. I opened tickets with Microsoft at https://cert.microsoft.com for several of these IP addresses but the tickets were closed within a minute with a generic response: “This report could not be validated, no action was taken.”

It seems others have had this same issue.

Since this is a personal website and I don’t really need to be concerned with corporate connectivity, I decided just to block the entire AzureCloud. You can conveniently download the list from here in JSON format. I blocked the AzureCloud network prefixes.

Good bye, Azure VPS.

Awesome Oktober

Oh my! This is the best Oktoberfest I’ve ever tried. Definitely gets a thumbs up!

Microsoft, are you freaking kidding me?

And this is why I sometimes really get frustrated with Microsoft Windows.

Sandy is a dandy

Been looking for a good alternative to the sweet Oktoberfests I’ve been drinking as of late and this one is great!

Thanks to Mother’s Brewing.

Smoked pork tenderloin

Pork tenderloin, rubbed with chili powder, salt, brown sugar and a healthy dose of paprika, smoked low and slow for four hours.

Apple iOS8, caching server fail

Update: Apple confirms they screwed up.

We did what would could to prepare for Apple’s release of iOS8; We’ve had an Apple Caching Server up and running for months. We expected to fade the new release without a hitch. But instead, Apple did something that appears to have disabled caching of the iOS8 update (see this Reddit comment in this Reddit thread, we observed the exact same issue.)

What did we do? Blacklisted the two update domains, mesu.apple.com and appldnld.apple.com in DNS.

It’s a shame we have to disable updates in order to maintain bandwidth order but c’mon Apple, why did you break the caching server?

Pork chops, Jamaican jerk rub

Thin chops that were grilled using a jerk rub spice from my sister-in-law, purchased at a family reunion. Proceeds go to fund the next reunion. So, so good!

Some assembly required

It’s a hot August evening and I wanted a good chill down. Just what the doctor ordered.