Patrick Stasko, Resident of the City of Parma and President of the E – Techron Group, was awarded Citizen of the Month for June 2010. Patrick has lead Team E – Techron to fundraise over $13,000 for charities in Northern Ohio. Patrick’s involvement with this year’s Special Olympics Plane Pull, lead to the teaming up with the Trinity Special Olympics to pull a Boeing 737 to raise funds and awareness for the handicapped.

The video of the Plane Pull can be found here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7DECT6_K8Q and Patrick’s Award in front of City Council can be found here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhrlsPzNHgc  

For more information regarding, Team E – Techron please visit, www.teametechron.com, E – Techron Group please visit, www.etechrongroup.com, and Trinity Special Olympics please visit, http://www.trinityspecialolympics.com

A special sincere thanks goes out to Donald Graves, Mayor Dean DePiero, Law Director Timothy Dobeck and every individual at Trinity Special Olympics!

This is not a technology blog post but it does include the city which the you and the E - Techron Group works and live in, Cleveland, Ohio.  Drew Carey, a native Clevelander, has teamed up with reason.tv to help fix “The Mistake On The Lake”.

Please take a moment to watch the video’s at Reasons to Save Cleveland with Drew Carey!

Drew Carrey is not the only one focusing on Cleveland there is a variety of other groups of people helping to fix Cleveland in their own ways such as CoolCleveland.com, City Vision: Project Cleveland, Cleveland Scene and Cleveland Magazine.

Take some time to reinvest into your city!

The E – Techron Group has been working very hard over the past few weeks to deliver more products and services which are available. This is part of the E –Techron Group’s plan to be a one-stop-shop for your business needs.

• Domain Registration - .com, .net, .org, .me, .biz, .mobi, .info, and .name domain registrations, transfers and renewals are now available!
• SSL Certificates – Authorized reseller of VeriSign and GeoTrust SSL Certificates.
• Templates – Order a variety of Drupal based web templates.

The Domain Name System (DNS) has been around since the start of the ‘internet’ and is inherently insecure! DNS provides the service which converts a human readable address such as www.google.com to an IP address which a computer can understand. An IP address is comparable to an address on a street for your home or business; there is an address, a block name, a city name, state and country name. The internet has an addressing scheme as well this is where DNS comes into play.

When you browse to www.google.com, your computer makes a request to the next computer network in the chain to see if they have the IP address for www.google.com. If the next computer network in route does not have the answer to the request the DNS query gets forward to its’ next computer network in the chain until it finds the answer and reports back in the same manner which it traveled out of your computer network. Essentially, each computer network trusts the next network and responses by the next work by default without validation or any type of authentication.

Hackers can craft responses in a manner which is set to send traffic to the wrong network often looking like the destination which makes a DNS Cache Poisoning Attack so hard to detect! When a DNS query is made (asks for the IP address of a particular domain name, eg. google.com) the first computer to respond is the record which is saved for later use. The attacker has to send a malicious response to your query before the official response can make its way back with the correct information. The small time window is enough for a hacker to intercept and redirect traffic of any kind, including personal data such as credit card numbers and social security numbers. The diagram below illustrates all the possible locations of attack in a DNS attack.

DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) incorporates Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to setup a chain of trust which has been validated by an external party. For example, SSL Certificates are an example of PKI. DNSSEC is aimed to prevent DNS Cache Poising Attacks and to ultimately provide validation of trusted DNS servers on the internet to ensure the data being served is that of the actual intended provider.

The E – Techron Group was had the opportunity to deal with three vendors that support and provide DNSSEC services for corporate networks; BlueCat Networks, Infoblox and Secure64. BlueCat Network’s Adonis & Proteus products are DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (IPAM) appliances that support DNSSEC. In addition, the Infoblox series appliances offer DNS, DHCP, IPAM, NTP and TFTP services with support for DNSSEC as well. Secure64 offers a highly secure software solution that takes advantages of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) in the HP Integrity rx2660 server by storing the Private Keys on the hardware encrypted microchip.

Each vendor had its pro’s and con’s but was most impressed overall with Infoblox’s appliance. Infoblox provides a rich graphical user interface (GUI) which is easy and simple to use for managing IP addresses, DHCP leases, DNS entries and DNSSEC settings. The Infoblox appliance can be configured in a variety of High Availability (HA) ways to prevent outages and the support from the regional staff was far superior than the other vendors. Infoblox’s DNSSEC implementation is easy and straight forward that is in line with the NIST recommended guidelines for DNSSEC.

BlueCat Network’s GUI had a learning curve which made using the device difficult at first. After the initial learning curve it wSSas more manageable to navigate.

Secure64 provides highly propriety software which focuses on security and performance due to its minimal footprint. Secure64 is able to have high performance and security by stripping out all unneeded services to only provide DNS and DNSSEC operations. There is no GUI with Secure64 but instead the only way to configure the unit is through a SSH session remotely. Secure64 is a great device which appears to be geared towards the Top-Level-Domain providers due to the TLD’s size and security requirements.

Overall, the structure of the internet will begin to adopt DNSSEC technologies due to rising security concerns and the fact the Federal US government mandates implementation on all .GOV top level domains. This has been reported to be one of the largest changes to the internet.

The E – Techron Group has experiences setting up and implementing Bluecat Networks Adonis & Proteus, Infoblox NS Grid and Secure64 DNS Signer appliances. Please contact the E – Techron Group to setup DNSSEC for your infrastructure.

Dropbox is an easy way to to store, sync, and, share files online just for your self or between multiple people. Dropbox offers 2GB of storage free and you can be eligable for additional storage up to a total of 10GB if you can refer the maximum amount of people allowed. Dropbox also has pay plans; 50GB/9.99 a month or 100GB/19.99 a month. Dropbox has built-in revisioning, mobile device access, web access, multi-operating system and rest assured all your files are stored with AES-256 encryption! This is a terrific service! Use this link for your free 2GB of storage today!

Drupal is an open-source content management system. That sounds pretty complex but in reality it is a pretty simple concept. Drupal is a platform, a system, that holds all the information for a website. The information can be content such as this very text, images, how the website looks, feels and much more! Drupal was first developed in 2001 and has always been free of charge with large community support helping to develop themes, modules, and much more. The Drupal Framework is rich in features which supports theming/templating, RSS feeds, single and multiuser blogging, user registration, logging and administration system right out of the box!

This website is Drupal powered and many more websites out on the internet. To see a gallery of Drupal powered websites and what Drupal can do, take a look http://www.drupalsites.net. One of the most notable websites to monition is Drupal powered is, http://www.whitehouse.gov The Drupal project has proven reliability and security to standards of the United States Whitehouse Website. With that being said, Drupal is a perfect platform for the E – Techron Group’s website and our customers!  

The E – Techron Group has experience deploying all your Drupal needs. Setting up your business’s website on the Drupal platform is cost-effective and is user friendly to you and your customers.

Voice communicationsis essential to any business. Traditional PBX systems could be very costly when each line had to be leased from your local telephone provider. There are a variety of open source projects which can reduce your cost significantly if you have a PBX telephone system in house.

Most open source PBX projects are based of Digium's Asterisk core which provides the VoIP PBX functionality. Distributions of VoIP PBX nearly always features Asterisk as a core then each project includes additions or a multitude of custom scripting to set projects apart. FreePBX is the Graphical User Interface (GUI) in nearly all the projects. Although projects often brand the FreePBX interface to their own project, it is highly reliable and depended on for web-based management of any Asterisk based PBX system.

The most popular project is trixbox CE. trixbox CE combines the best of the open source telephony tools into one easy-to-install package, along with the trixbox dashboard which provides a web-based interface to configure and manage a complete IP-PBX system. The most flexible and customizable communications platform available, trixbox CE averages over 65,000 downloads a month.

Another project worth looking at is Elastix. Elastix is an appliance software that integrates the best tools available for Asterisk-based PBXs into a single, easy-to-use interface. It also adds its own set of utilities and allows for the creation of third party modules to make it the best software package available for open source telephony.

The goals of Elastix are reliability, modularity and ease-of-use. These characteristics added to the strong reporting capabilities make it the best choice for implementing an Asterisk-based PBX.

The E - Techron Group has experience in both trixbox CE and Elastix. To see a working demonstration of our work simply call our 877.397.5247 number and you will be calling into the Elastix implementation of the Voice-over-IP technology. 

When we log onto the Internet, we take a lot for granted. We assume we'll be able to access any Web site we want, whenever we want, at the fastest speed, whether it's a corporate or mom-and-pop site. We assume that we can use any service we like -- watching online video, listening to podcasts, sending instant messages -- anytime we choose. What makes all these assumptions possible is Net Neutrality.

Send a message to Congress stating you want them to support Net Neutrality. Send a message here!