A Windows System Admin's Blog

A Windows System Admin's Blog

Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management

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  • 12-21-2024

    Enable the Intel 82579V Giagbit NIC on Server 2016

    Server 2012 R2, Server 2016, Windows Server

    An old draft I’ve had for a while, just posting for posterity and safe keeping. So I’ve done a few upgrades to my VM Host machine and decided to go up to Windows Server 2016, once installed and at the desktop, I found my onboard LAN port wasn’t coming up, so I downloaded the driver […]

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  • 10-10-2024

    Aruba Switches and Trancievers

    Aruba Networking, Ubiquiti

    Vendors tend to lock down the type of transceivers you can use on their SFP/SFP+ and QSFP ports. They do this for a number of reasons but mainly in the spirit of support and quality (which I can understand). there are a number of guidelines around agreed upon by networking vendors that fall under Multi-Source […]

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  • 9-23-2024

    Power BI Gateway SSL Issues with managed AWS RDS SQL Server instances

    AWS, RDS, SQL Server

    I had a customer call up and explain their Power BI reports had stopped working, they’re not managed so after working a few things out we got to work and jumped into their Datawarehouse environment in AWS. After a quick look we could see that their RDS SQL Server instance had TLS turned on and […]

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  • 9-10-2024

    Time Hierarchy in Active Directory

    Active Directory, Group Policy, Service Configuration, Windows

    Time is more critical in Active Directory than many admins realise. Time inaccuracy can cause logs to mismatch or things like license failures for anything with DRM. Larger time differences can begin to cause authentication failures since Keberos relies on accurate time or affect replication health. By default, all AD member machines synchronise with any […]

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  • 9-2-2024

    Bypass Windows 11 TPM Setup Checks

    Windows

    Quick one – I’m doing some testing in my home lab environment with Windows 11 and this box doesn’t have a TPM (so it’s not enabled in Hyper-V). Booting up the Windows 11 iso and trying to install will tell you that it’s unsupported. To get around that, load the setup as normal and once […]

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  • 8-29-2024

    AWS and Windows Activation

    AWS, KMS

    Quick one today where I was on a client server hosted in AWS that wasn’t activated. Trying to activate it via Settings App throws and error. Like most large scale cloud vendors (except Azure), AWS use KMS to activate their windows machines, however sometimes the servers need some help to reach the internal KMS servers […]

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  • 8-19-2024

    RDP to Windows Login Screen

    Remote Desktop Services

    I was recently resurrecting an old demo environment in AWS which consisted of a few EC2 virtual machines, however upon trying to login, I quickly realised that the account password had expired and by default Windows Remote Desktop doesn’t have an ability to change passwords since you’re not presented with the logon screen.  We didn’t […]

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  • 8-15-2024

    Australian FTTP via Telstra not connecting to FortiGate

    FortiGate, FortiOS, Networking

    We recently had a customer take advantage of a free upgrade from FTTN (Fibre to the Node) to FTTP (Fibre to the Premise) for their NBN (National Broadband Network) service. However during cut-over the FortiGate wasn’t picking up connectivity on the WAN port, this had the on-site guy stumped for 10 minutes until we jumped […]

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  • 8-2-2024

    Sync multiple Pi-Hole Configs

    Docker, Pi-Hole

    For my home network, I run Pi-Hole in docker containers in separate hosts. Whenever making a change such as creating a local DNS entry on one Pi-hole means logging into the other Pi-hole and making the same change, not ideal. So I’ve tried looking for a solution to this. I did give Gravity sync a […]

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  • 7-25-2024

    Fix FortiGate HA out of sync

    FortiGate, FortiOS

    Sometimes after performing a Firmware upgrade on FortiGate HA pairs, I find that after sometime the cluster still stays out of sync and won’t synchronise. I usually find this is because the checksums of the config files on each or some members are different. To quickly check if this is the case, fire up the […]

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  • 7-17-2024

    SAML SSO for FortiWeb Admin interface

    Entra ID, Fortinet, FortiWeb, SSO

    I was recently engaged with a large health-care provider in deploying a set of FortiWeb VMs to protect a number of web applications. Part of this deployment included setting up Single-Sign on for the admin interface using Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD). While the process is fairly straightforward it is a little confusing at some […]

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  • 7-9-2024

    Bad Image Error when installing CrowdStrike sensor on Amazon WorkSpaces

    AWS, CrowdStrike, WorkSpaces

    Long time since I’ve posted – I promise I’ve been very busy with life. I was recently assisting a customer with a CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor deployment and we were in the process of updating the gold images in their VDI platform, Amazon WorkSpaces.  CrowdStrike have a nice installation document on their website that you can […]

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  • 4-25-2023

    Add AWS CLI to Windows Terminal

    AWS, CLI, PowerShell, Windows Terminal

    I am a fan of Windows Terminal and some of the recent things Microsoft seem to be doing for SysAdmins. I like having all the tools I need in a single spot. Adding the AWS CLI is fairly straight forward but makes life a heap easier.  Start by installing Python from python.org if you don’t […]

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  • 4-18-2023

    Hide the Bing button in Edge

    Group Policy, Microsoft Edge, Uncategorized

    I’m not a fan of the Bing button that now appears in Edge. Microsoft seem to have rushed it out as there isn’t an easy way to remove it. We’ll do this via a registry key (that can also be deployed via Group Policy) Close out of Microsoft Edge completely and open the Registry Editor […]

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  • 1-9-2023

    Adopt Unifi Access Point over Internet or VPN using SSH

    Ubiquiti

    If you’ve shipped some Ubiquiti Unifi Wireless access points to a remote site before adopting them or happen to have your controller on another network, you can log into them via SSH and point them to your Unifi controller. It performs discovery via basic L2 broadcast and DNS resolution of hostname unifi, if either of […]

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