Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the Oxford ICTF Conference on Multi-Factor Authentication and Password Stores with Smart Cards and YubiKeys, the video recording is online now here – https://youtu.be/WGtCxS2YFNA and the presentation can be downloaded through the link below.
A special shout out goes to the Yubico press office for providing a set of YubiKey 4s, YubiKey NEOs and Security Keys which helped fuel a very lively Q and A session!
Presentation.pdf (5.5 MiB, 396 hits)
Yes! Yes it they do!
In preparing for a presentation to some peers in the wider IT community tomorrow I have access to some YubiKey Neo authentication keys; in doing some extra reading up on the keys I thought – I wonder if these work with the MIFARE readers (note that these are MIFARE readers not the proprietary Paxton only readers) that are part of our Door Access Control system.
Lone behold they do; in the revision of the keys we have it’s a NXP MIFARE Classic 1k chip.
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 enjoy the photos!
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 follow the short guide in the screenshots adding in the line shown in the gist below.
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 (through the registry or with the fantastic IIS Crypto – https://www.nartac.com/Products/IISCrypto) ended up sorting the issue for us.
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.
Presentation (PowerPoint) (28.5 MiB, 273 hits)
Presentation (PDF) (4.9 MiB, 302 hits)
30/03/2018 Update
Microsoft have published this blog post – https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2018/03/29/windows-server-semi-annual-channel-update which clarifies the difference between the Long-Term Servicing Channel (Server 2016/2019/so on) against the Semi-Annual Channel. Do have a read!
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 live firmware update this morning (last time round I just reloaded both management modules at the same time) I’m going to go with the following plan.
- Update the firmware (wait a few minutes for the firmware to copy from the primary to the secondary module – this is automatic)
- Reboot the standby module using the boot standby command (and wait a few minutes)
- Confirm that the standby module is now running the new firmware with show redundancy
- Failover from the active to the standby module – this caused a few seconds of downtime in my environment
- Once the failover is complete the previously active module will now also be running the new firmware
For easy copy and paste see the commands on GitHub below along with the screenshot sequence which shows you how this will look on a switch running the 16.x branch firmware.
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
1 Intro (4.3 MiB, 460 hits)
2 MDT (85.2 MiB, 537 hits)
3 PowerShell (27.5 MiB, 420 hits)
4 PRTG Network Monitor (47.5 MiB, 447 hits)
5 OpenVAS (32.9 MiB, 393 hits)
6 WSUS and Chocolatey (60.3 MiB, 450 hits)
7 NPS and VLANs (10.7 MiB, 510 hits)
Slides as PDF
1 Intro (2.0 MiB, 423 hits)
2 MDT (2.2 MiB, 551 hits)
3 PowerShell (1.8 MiB, 489 hits)
4 PRTG Network Monitor (3.2 MiB, 506 hits)
5 OpenVAS (2.3 MiB, 480 hits)
6 WSUS and Chocolatey (2.9 MiB, 561 hits)
7 NPS and VLANs (1.4 MiB, 499 hits)
Stay tuned over the coming days for the scripts that are mentioned through the video which will be linked to from this post.
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 policy.
In the example below we can see that Group Policy Infrastructure took much longer to apply than expected (normally only a second or two), you can then dig into the cause by clicking the View Log link to the right which pops out even more detail to dig through. In this case the cause of the slow policy application appeared to be old ADM files (Windows XP era) being included with the policy; deleting the files resolved the issue.
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 some work while doing it’s scans I’ve got a custom scan configured (which will be used in later blog posts) that will only scan hosts which reply to PING.
Have a look at the screenshot sequence below to see how to configure such a scan.
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