Email has been my main form of communication for many years.  No doubt it is probably yours as well.  It is ubiquitous, and there is no end in sight.  Although we all have unique email addresses, very rarely do you see people who make use of an email certificate.  A certificate indicates that the user has at least taken some steps to ensure that their email message originated from to them.  It is not fool-proof, but is a step in the right direction.  Not only can you digitally sign your emails indicating to the end user it really did come from is you, if both parties have exchanged public certificates (which is as easy as sending a signed email to each other), you can digitally encrypt emails for further security.

There are many ways to acquire a certificate, but the easiest I have found is Comodo (http://www.comodo.com/home/email-security/free-email-certificate.php).  Not only is it easy, it is free ,and works well with Apple mail on OS X, I just had to make sure I used Safari to retrieve my certificate.

So what are you waiting for?  Get your email certificate today!

In part one, we learned how to setup a local caching DNS server using Bind. In part two, we will learn how to setup our own zone which will allow us to interact with a private VPN, as well as configure our local server to use either the name servers provided to you by your ISP or your OpenDNS account.

It is very easy to take for granted a very valuable service, the Domain Naming System (DNS).  DNS provides us the ability to lookup and resolve internet addresses without the need to know the Internet Protocol (IP) address.  Imagine, that if you wanted to do a Google search with no DNS, you would have to know that http://google.com is really  72.14.204.147.  To make DNS requests (lookups) convenient, most people are assigned a DNS server when they receive their IP address from their Internet Service Provider (ISP) .

In this article, we will learn how to, and more importantly why we should, setup our own caching DNS server and how use it as our primary server.

Every time you point your browser to a location, a DNS lookup request is made.  Depending on the amount of network traffic, or the load on the DNS machine you were assigned, this lookup request can sometimes take as much as two to three seconds.  If you have ever noticed your browser’s status bar saying “Looking up host...” and then just sit there for what seems like a very long time, this is what it is doing.  By routing all DNS requests through a local caching DNS server, once we have made the initial request, for let’s say google.com, the caching server remembers the lookup information and will use the cached copy the nest time the same request comes though.

Our solution involves the installation and configuration of a Bind (http://www.bind9.net/) server.  Bind, which stands for Berkley Internet Name Domain), is a very popular open source implementation of the DNS protocol, and is readily available on most Linux servers as well as OS X.