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In my lab environment, I am constantly deploying different Virtual Machines. I’ve built up a number of template vhdx files which are either sysprep’d installs of Windows Server or custom images ready to go. Manually setting up VMs via the User interface can be a little time consuming, so I’ve written up a small PowerShell
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I was recently out at a site working through an 802.1x wired implementation, their site runs all Aruba Networking gear running older style ArubaOS (or AOS) which is basically the ProCurve/ProVision with a mix of 2930f, 3810m switches and 5406zl chassis. The hard work of certificates has already been done sine we earlier did a
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So my main workstation and laptop run Windows. We run 1Password to store our passwords and SSH keys and while with the 1Password SSH Agent I can use keys for OpenSSH in Windows and this works well, the same isn’t true for use with WinSCP which only uses Putty Agent (Pageant) to access keys and
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I was recently contacted by someone to assist with some maintenance on their Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager servers. One of those tasks was replacing their expiring, but everytime they went to replace it they got an error along the lines of Certificate chain is invalid. The expected order is Policy Manager Server, Sub CA and
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I’ve recently been helping a non-profit uplift their security – we’ve put in a UniFi Gateway along with cleaning up their 365 tenancy and endpoint management. As part of this, we’ve implemented a WireGuard VPN back to their NAS as well as remove local admin rights from end users. Unfortunately, WireGuard by default requires local
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I was recently on a call with a customer who had migrated their VMs to a new Hyper-V host (and away from VMWare) and had a few Ubuntu VMs for hosting their PHP stack of applications. Part of the call we were doing a review of some of the VMs and the customer complained that
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I was recently engaged to review a organisation’s Entra configuration around Password Security and their Conditional Access policies. Now I’ve seen tenants with the number of policies ranging from a handful to hundreds of policies over the years, these guys had about 50, which is still quite a few to go through by hand. Now
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I was recently building a PoC Lab environment for a client where I only had a couple of virtual machines to play with to build a Remote Desktop Services environment to host a line of business application. I needed to be able to publish the application as a Remote App as well as have a
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I was recently in a bit of a bind and needed to get a large file from a server to another workstation, the server had IIS and was already live on the internet but when I copied across the file and tried to download it but was getting a 404 File not found. The file
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I’ve been recently doing some consulting for a school using a piece of software (a SIS called Synergetic) that uses Crystal Reports and switching to a new workstation has meant there were a few things I needed to get set up again. One of the frustrations I quickly found was that the Data Expert view
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An MSP I do some consulting for use PRTG for their monitoring of environments. SNMP is a lightweight monitoring method for PRTG which trumps WMI monitoring. and doesn’t require admin rights on the local machine (or the shortcut of using a domain admin account). I’ve got a quick PowerShell script that will install the SNMP
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Licensing your Entra Administrator accounts for email is a common practice to ensure you are across service health updates, user, security and billing alerts but by doing this it introduces security risks and additional costs for mailbox licensing. As a best practice, privileged accounts should remain isolated from unnecessary communication channels to minimise vulnerabilities or
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Over the years I’ve come across a number of different environments with many running Active Directory in many different states. Replication is an important part of ensuring that your AD environment is healthy and highly available to service end users. I’ve compiled some notes around Active Directory Replication commands and gathering information. Firstly, just give
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I was recently doing a new FortiGate deployment for a customer and one of the requirements included setting up Deep Packet SSL Inspection for their users. The customer already has an Internal CA so we generated a certificate for the FortiGate to use for encryption and clients already trusted the certificate as it was part
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One thing I like to get going whenever taking on a new tenant or client is the password protection features. By Default, Entra already has some password protection for your cloud users which detects and blocks known weak passwords such as password and password123 or qwerty as well as looking at well-known passwords that are
A Windows System Admin's Blog
Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management