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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

Quick one today where I was on a client server hosted in AWS that wasn’t activated and 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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 follow to get the sensor deployed. After going through the process… Source ..read more

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 already have it on your machine. Once installed (take note of the version, which as of publishing is 3.11... Source ..read more