Warrant Officer Recruiting

Warrant 99th Birthday

I know I’m a little bit late getting this posted but here is the schedule for the first half of FY 18 warrant officer selection board.  As I’ve written before a few times, it’s our job to find our replacements so make sure you take the time to talk to your NCOs that show promise and mentor them to come to the dark side.

Signal-Chief is Now “Secure”

You likely haven’t noticed yet, but if you look at the top corner of your browser, you should be seeing a little lock symbol up there for the first time (at least when you came to this site). For years now, Signal-Chief has been served up on straight HTTP. I was never really worried about it because there is no personal information on the site, and the only person who actually logged into it was me (and I use unique passwords on everything)

Screwing Around with IPTables When It Doesn’t Play Nice

Firewall

So you may not have noticed (hopefully) but I recently moved signal-chief from a shared hosting instance on GoDaddy to a dedicated VPS system. As a cyber guy, one of the first things I wanted to do was to start with some basic security so of course step one is to run yum update to update all of my packages, and step two was to setup some firewall rules. To allow me to initial a connection (DNS, http, whatever) from the server and get the return traffic back. Unfortunately when I tried to run this command I got “iptables: No chain/target/match by that name” sent back to me. Well that’s frustrating.

Translating Geek to Geek

Nerdy Grunt

Imagine this scenario…. “The first neutron passes the LD and engages enemy position.  The enemy position is destroyed and the damage is extensive enough to cause an adjoining position to catch fire.  When the ammunition in that adjoining position explodes it takes out another position…” Huh?

Where the Hell am I?

GPS Satellite

As anyone who has spent more than an hour or two driving around the box at NTC knows, it can be pretty damn easy to get lost in the desert, especially at night under blackout conditions.  After 3.5 years there, I got pretty good at knowing my way around the box but during each rotation there was always at least one or two times where I would get turned around and have no idea where the hell I was

Getting from A to Z Part 2 (Troubleshooting Layer 3)

Troubleshooting

By and large I personally think that most of us are much more comfortable with layer three than any other layer in the OSI model. We deal with it each and every day. We have a number of tools at our disposal which make it very easy for us to see if/when it’s working and just how the data is traveling. To start with though, we have to know just how things are supposed to work.