What Does the Bible Say About Being Afraid?

Psalm 56   New American Standard Bible (NASB)

For the choir director; according to Jonath elem rehokim. A Mikhtam of David, when the Philistines seized him in Gath.

Be gracious to me, O God, for man has trampled upon me;
Fighting all day long he oppresses me.
My foes have trampled upon me all day long,
For they are many who fight proudly against me.
When I am afraid,
I will put my trust in You.
In God, whose word I praise,
In God I have put my trust;
I shall not be afraid.
What can mere man do to me?
All day long they distort my words;
All their thoughts are against me for evil.
They attack, they lurk,
They watch my steps,
As they have waited to take my life.
Because of wickedness, cast them forth,
In anger put down the peoples, O God!

You have taken account of my wanderings;
Put my tears in Your bottle.
Are they not in Your book?
Then my enemies will turn back in the day when I call;
This I know, that God is for me.
In God, whose word I praise,
In the Lord, whose word I praise,
In God I have put my trust, I shall not be afraid.
What can man do to me?
Your vows are binding upon me, O God;
I will render thank offerings to You.
For You have delivered my soul from death,
Indeed my feet from stumbling,
So that I may walk before God
In the light of the living.

 

Psalm 91   New American Standard Bible (NASB)

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
My God, in whom I trust!”
For it is He who delivers you from the snare of the trapper
And from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with His pinions,
And under His wings you may seek refuge;
His faithfulness is a shield and bulwark.

You will not be afraid of the terror by night,
Or of the arrow that flies by day;
Of the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
Or of the destruction that lays waste at noon.
A thousand may fall at your side
And ten thousand at your right hand,
But it shall not approach you.
You will only look on with your eyes
And see the recompense of the wicked.
For you have made the Lord, my refuge,
Even the Most High, your dwelling place.
No evil will befall you,
Nor will any plague come near your tent.

For He will give His angels charge concerning you,
To guard you in all your ways.
They will bear you up in their hands,
That you do not strike your foot against a stone.
You will tread upon the lion and cobra,
The young lion and the serpent you will trample down.

“Because he has loved Me, therefore I will deliver him;
I will set him securely on high, because he has known My name.
“He will call upon Me, and I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will rescue him and honor him.
“With a long life I will satisfy him
And let him see My salvation.”


Posted in Christian

Difference between TCP and UDP

If you work with computers, you probably have heard about the TCP and UDP protocols. While they both are mechanisms to transmit data to other computers, they do not operate in the same manner. Below I’ll show you some differences between the two data protocols.

TCP (stands for “Transmission Control Protocol”)

  • It’s a connection-orientated data protocol
  • TCP is best used for applications that require high reliability
  • There is more overhead (more computer resources used) when using TCP
  • Other protocols such as: HTTP, HTTPs, FTP, and SMTP make use of the TCP protocol
  • TCP makes sure that the order in which data is received is the same order in which it was originally sent
  • TCP is typically slower than UDP
  • TCP allows for “flow control”
  • TCP checks for errors in the data transmission
  • TCP acknowledges segments
  • TCP has both error checking and options to recover in-case of an error

UDP (stands for “User Data-gram Protocol”)

  • Not a connection-oriented protocol
  • UDP is useful for applications that need fast transmission of data (regardless of data integrity)
  • Less overhead when using UDP, since UDP is a connectionless protocol
  • Other protocols such as: DNS, DHCP, and VOIP make use of the UDP protocol
  • UDP does not make sure that data received is in the same order that it was originally transmitted (less reliable, but faster)
  • UDP is typically faster than TCP
  • UDP has no “flow control”
  • UDP does not check for errors in the data transmission (less reliable, but faster)
  • UDP does not acknowledge segments
  • UDP has error checking but does not have any way to recover from errors it detects

Posted in Computers, Internet and Servers, Operating Systems

Web Hosting at Home – Pros and Cons

Have you ever thought of hosting your own website from home? This is a question many people on the Internet have asked before. While there are many answers to the question I wrote above, I will give my basic opinion on the matter.

Hosting from home is not always easy. You must manage:

  • Your Internet connection (at least to a certain degree)
  • Internet router
  • Server hardware
  • Software (including securing your server OS installation and keeping the software up-to-date)
  • Dealing with hacking attempts
  • Clean-up successful hacking attempts (this rarely happens on a properly setup server)
  • Keep consistent backups of your data (I do three backups daily on my server)
  • Putting in battery backups and power surge protectors
  • Dealing with support requests

My context when saying “hosting from home” is not running a large web-hosting business. I mean hosting your own private/business website as well as a few friends’ websites (including email). Obviously, you cannot be a large “GoDaddy” web-host, while you are running out of your home. That is not a realistic expectation.

The advantages of hosting from home are the following:

1) Privacy of your data

If setup correctly, no one can easily snoop on your private, confidential data that is on your own server.

2) You can choose your own server hardware

You are not limited by a web host’s hardware options for your server.

3) You can easily deal with server hardware failures

You don’t have to wait for a technician to fix your server.

4) Possibly cheaper for you in the long run

A decent Virtual Private Server purchased online could easily run $20.00/month, and a decent dedicated server could be as much as $100.00/month minimum!

5) No commitments to a web hosting company

You do not have to worry about some web hosting company making unreasonable demands (e.g., 50,000 file limit — on some large websites, you could easily go over a limit like this).

The disadvantages of hosting from home are the following:

1) Possible higher Internet service cost

Your ISP may require you to purchase an Internet service business plan instead of a residential one; this can possibly be expensive but not guaranteed to be expensive.

2) You may not have enough upstream bandwidth

To host efficiently from home, you will need to have at least 30 Mbps of upload speed; any less and you will notice performance degradation with loading your websites from other locations.

Please keep in mind if you are wanting to host several large videos, I recommend either lowering the bit-rate of your videos – so they will stream faster for your users – or use a 3rd party hosting service just for the videos themselves. Most self-hosters will not have enough upload bandwidth to properly serve 1GB+ video files.

3) Unstable home power

Few people may not have stable power at their house or business and thus their server goes on and off; this can easily be fixed by putting in a battery backup for your server.

4) Reliability of your Internet Service Provider

Unless you have a signed agreement with your ISP, they are under no obligation to keep your Internet connection up 24/7.

5) More manual labor required

On a hosted solution online, someone else does the hard work with maintaining your server; when you host from home, you must do it all yourself.

I hope the above helps you decide on whether to self-host web services. I know there are a lot of people online who say it is “bad, silly, stupid, not smart, wouldn’t recommend it” when it comes self-hosing web services.

With all due respect to those people, most of them have never done web hosting by themselves before, and are trashing something they have never done (which is silly and bad in itself!).


Posted in Computers, Internet and Servers

Akamai Discovers Linux Botnet that Hits with 150 Gbps DDoS Attacks

According to a web article, Akamai (a Content Delivery Network company) discovered a massive Linux botnet. A botnet is basically a bunch of compromised computers that allow attackers to perform various tasks that would otherwise be virtually impossible to accomplish without everyone’s compromised computers.

Basically, the botnet comes in the form of a Trojan. This Trojan targets Linux systems (including network routers). Once it gets into the system, it proceeds to download software to connect the computer to the botnet. The botnet is reportedly able to give up to a 150 Gbps DDoS** attack.

As I have said on my blog repeatedly, Linux is not immune to security problems. No operating system on the planet is immune to security problems. In this case, it is people using weak, insecure passwords on their Linux boxes.

If I set my Windows box’s Administrator password to ‘password123’ or ‘qwerty’, enabled remote desktop on my computer, and allow remote desktop through the firewall, I would eventually get hacked. Was that Windows’ fault or Microsoft’s fault? No, of course not. It would be my fault for setting a bad password on my computer.

Many people say “Linux is more secure than Windows”, but if you notice – most of the time – they do not give any technical arguments to backup what they said.

For example, a part of one of someone’s comment posted online said (direct quote):
“The primary attack vector to take over these systems is default or weak login passwords, and allowing internet-facing remote root. That has no bearing on Linux suddenly being less secure than it was yesterday, or in any way magically now just as insecure as Windows.”

Notice he said “That has no bearing on Linux suddenly being less secure than it was yesterday, or in any way magically now just as insecure as Windows.”, but he did not give any technical arguments to backup what he said. How is Windows “insecure”? How is Linux I have seen this dozens of times (no kidding).

What is worse is people will listen to them, assuming they are correct (e.g., Linux is more secure than Windows), and go off and repeat the same misinformation around on the Internet without even bothering to check if the information they received is in fact accurate.

Web article link: https://www.engadget.com/2015/09/29/linux-botnet-hits-with-150-gbps-ddos/

** Simply put, a DDoS attack is basically an attack that uses up the victim’s available bandwidth. This causes the victim’s computers to not correctly function when communicating with the outside world and internal network.


Posted in Computers, Internet and Servers, Operating Systems, Software

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