A late one for this release of ‘from around the web’ after being on holiday for the last week – as the case always seems to be I’ve come out of the sun quite red. This week we have another step in the right direction to getting rid of passwords, some helpful templates for building a first config for a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall and an interesting (short) review of the Hubitat home automation hub.

New Azure Active Directory capabilities help you eliminate passwords at work
It’s been promised by Microsoft (and some others) for quite some time and it looks like another leap in the right direction has been made. With FIDO2 and devices like the YubiKey password less login on Windows 10 Azure AD domain joined devices is happening. Be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the page!

iron-skillet
All the options within a PAN NGFW can seem quite daunting and while the out of the box settings for security policies will help they are far from best practice. That’s where the IronSkillet comes in handy to take some of that pain away and give you a serious starting point.

Smart Home Hub – Hubitat Review
For the people who don’t have the time (or know how) to invest in something like Home Assistant but aren’t up for relying on a connection to the ‘cloud’ for home automation then Hubitat may well be for you. I’ve been exploring home automation for quite some time (at the moment using LIFX and HomeSeer) and may well consider looking into Hubitat some more if/when I decide to expand on it.

In this new blog post series I’ll be looking at (normally a selection of 3) cool articles, news and other blog posts that I find interesting during the day. For this week we have PowerShell tricks, a detailed article on securing the Windows Firewall and an (old but very interesting) write up on the woes of network administrators when everything goes wrong.

PowerShell tricks: Splatting
New to me (always learning!) this trick allows you to populate the parameters for a PowerShell cmdlet in a table (makes for much neater formatting) to then pass into the cmdlet as a single object.

Endpoint Isolation with the Windows Firewall
The Windows Firewall may seem like a bit of a beast from time to time but this article makes some great points on how to build out a set of secure policies that can apply to pretty much any environment.

All systems down
A true disaster story – quite old (2003) but really worth a read to see what lessons you can take home.

Bit of a crazy issue when deploying a new Ruckus wireless network – in first suspecting an issue with the controller software or perhaps some kind of access control list blocking traffic it turns out that the default Windows Firewall rule for allowing NPS traffic is broken in some fashion.

Having tried this (and it working fine) on Windows Server 2012 R2/2016 it really does appear to be isolated to Server 2019.

Discovering this came about with a few traffic captures combined with the wonderful NTRadPing tool. The fix is to manually create the rule, see the screenshots below on how to do this.

The case

Image 1 of 2

A bit of an odd post but given this bag is proving so very handy I thought it worth it!

Having started a new job at the beginning of the year it was evident that I would need to carry around a bit more kit with me than previously, with Christmas just around the corner it was the perfect time to do a little research into cable organiser bags. After a fair bit of time on Amazon I came around to the BUMB Cable Bag in the ‘small’ size –
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cable-Electronics-Accessories-Organizer-Handle/dp/B01FCZUWNM.

After 3 months of use this bag has really proven itself with a others in the office ending up buying one as well! In particular I’ve liked-

  • The durable material and zips, haven’t had a jam or any sign of damage in daily use
  • The bright colour trim around the edge of the bag – goes well with the yellow/gold interior of my laptop bag making it super easy to see at night
  • The big loop on the side making it easy to grab ahold of when jammed in amongst all the other kit in my laptop bag
  • All the interior pouches are big enough for the cables I have

Continue reading

When running CLI commands against an HPE Aruba (previously ProCurve) switch that have long outputs you have likely encountered the line below.

— MORE –, next page: Space, next line: Enter, quit: Control-C

Although handy – on occasion you might need to turn this off. To do so simply run the command (no need to be in config mode for this) below.

no page

Note that this will only turn off paging for the current session so if you log out or reboot the switch you’ll need to run the command again. Equally so to turn paging back on simply run the command below.

page

While iterating through an issue with our Ruckus SmartZone (with Ruckus R510 Access Points) controllers I was looking for a way to see when the Access Points had applied the new configuration; lone behold it’s quite easily done through both the CLI and the GUI.

Anyone who has used the new SmartZone controllers will know all too well that’s it’s not the fastest GUI to work with – thus if you have the option I’d suggest you go with the CLI method which is very responsive (and much more consistent!).

Via the CLI

Via the GUI

So over the last few hours I’ve been making some config changes to our Eaton UPS Network Management Cards that require the magical ‘Reset Communication’ button to be pushed in the web interface (one day I must get the management software!). To help speed up the process (or at least know when I should reload the page) I timed the process; so as more of a reference to myself than anything else the results are…

Web interface will respond and provide an authentication prompt: About 2 minutes 10 seconds after button push
Web interface will display all UPS data: About 2 minutes and 30 seconds after button push

After a great many years since Custom RemoteFX RDS Farm it’s time for something new! After much discussion and looking at the working practices at my current place of work we’ve decided to go all in with RDS and to support that we’ve got 3 new servers to run it on.

2x 1U rack mounts to go in our main server room with 1x tower for our DR room.

Photos below!

For a little while now we’ve had issues with the uniFLOW Server service (version 5.3) not starting in a timely fashion (2hrs+).

After a harrowing tale of working with their support going in circles looking at issues with SQL Server and suchlike we worked out that the issue seemed to be caused by stale files at ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\NT-ware Shared\ActiveJobs’ some of which were many months old or 0KB in size.

Ultimately the solution was to stop the Uniflow Service (force quit it using Task Manager if it’s still in a broken ‘starting’ state) and then delete the contents of that folder with the exception of the readme_activejobsfolder.txt file (which mentions that you shouldn’t do anything to these files!) and then start the uniFLOW Service service (which started up in a few minutes).