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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 […]
A Windows System Admin's Blog
Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management