Mikrotik RouterBoard hAP ac – Unboxing

Recently I was inspired to take on some more information about routing and the associated protocols. To help support that I’ve gone and bought a Mikrotik RouterBoard hAP ac from Amazon (along with a RouterBoard hAP Lite). I hope to kick out a few blog posts on it along with my learning points over the next few days/weeks. In the meantime… Read more



Set the default new file for VS Code to PowerShell (or something else!)

Having recently changed from using PowerShell ISE to VS Code I’m still discovering all the super awesome new features of it (be sure to get a copy of the Keyboard shortcuts from this page – https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/keybindings). To get started I’ve changed the default new file language to PowerShell (not that you can’t change it to anything else though!). To do this… Read more



RDS on Server 2016, Failed: Unable to install the role services.

In putting together a small RDS (Session Based) environment on Server 2016 today today I kept running across the error message below during the installation. Failed: Unable to install the role services. After much back and forth between forums and event viewer it turns out our default policy to disable TLS 1.0 on servers was the issue. Enabling TLS 1.0… Read more



College IT Conference 2018 – Deploying and Managing Microsoft Services with PowerShell on Windows Server Core

Thanks to the organising committee of the (Oxford and Cambridge) College IT Conference 2018 held at the RAF Museum (Hendon) for the invite to talk about PowerShell and Server Core! As promised the video from the presentation is now up on YouTube; in addition the slides as PowerPoint and PDF can be seen below. <span class=”mce_SELRES_start” style=”width: 0px; line-height: 0;… Read more



Rebooting a HPE Aruba 5400R zl2 with dual Management Modules following a Firmware Update

If you have ever seen this post Server Room – The latest you will notice we have a pretty awesome HPE Aruba 5400R zl2 Core Switch; however (at least until now), I’ve been yet to find a really simple guide which shows the best way to reboot the management modules following a firmware update. So after much research and a… Read more



IT Open Day at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford

With thanks to the 50 staff from across the University for attending please see below the links to the videos and PowerPoints of the day! Direct link to Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLRxbdlgJzwyjAf820T0u4GpP0E01a9LEX&v=u-GVJ_0VuRM Slides as PowerPoint Slides as PDF Stay tuned over the coming days for the scripts that are mentioned through the video which will be linked to from this post.



Troubleshooting Slow Group Policy with GPRESULT

One of the often forgotten about features of gpresult is that it can output reports as HTML format (in a similar format to Group Policy Modelling) as well as to the command line – simply use the /h switch followed by a path. This includes much more useful data including how long it took to apply various aspects of the… Read more



Set OpenVAS to only scan hosts that reply to PINGs

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series A Windows SysAdmin installs and uses OpenVAS

In my environment all of our network connected devices are configured to respond to PINGs; this mainly comes about from using PRTG Network Monitor to confirm that devices and services are up even in the most simple of fashions. The same also applies to client PCs which through Group Policy are configured to reply to PING. Thus to save OpenVAS… Read more



A little fun with PowerShell and Milestone XProtect (read the config.xml file and get a list of Devices and Cameras)

A little bit of fun today with Milestone XProtect (in our case the express version) today; with the goal of improving our documentation I wanted to somehow obtain a list of all of the hardware devices (and to some degree the cameras) including there names, MAC addresses and IP addresses from our XProtect server. Lone behold the configuration.xml file typically… Read more



Setting the Source Interface/VLAN for RADIUS, SNTP, syslog, TACACS, Telnet, TFTP and sFlow on HPE Aruba (ProCurve) switch

If you are running an HPE Aruba (formally ProCurve) switch you may come across cases where your switch (in the example above a 5400R zl2) has multiple IP Addresses/VLANs and you need it to talk to another service (in my case syslog and sFlow receivers) on a set interface. When this occurs you can use the ip source-interface command (make… Read more