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
Category: Servers
Servers power many organisations and are even making their way into homes (even if it is a simple NAS box). With more RAM then you could even imagine (I have to admit I’m a RAM addict) and processors that make the latest and greatest gaming PC look minuscule in comparison it is these mighty machines that make the world go round.
Unable to mount the WIM, so the update process cannot continue – MDT on Hyper-V
Not the first time I’ve run into this issue and probably won’t be the last! While building a new Windows Server 2016 (Full) Microsoft Deployment Toolkit server when attempting to run the ‘Update Deployment Share’ wizard I was getting the following error message. Unable to mount the WIM, so the update process cannot continue. The solution is simple; if you… Read more
Upgrading PHP on a Windows IIS Server (Really basic)
Following on from some recent OpenVAS testing and in turn discovering that some of our PHP versions were sorely out of date I’ve set about to patch and document all of the installations. In turn we have a simple guide on how to update PHP security releases! Please note – this guide is aimed at really simple single server instances… Read more
A Windows SysAdmin installs and uses OpenVAS – End to end guide – Installation
This guide covers one (of I’m sure a 1,000) ways to deploy and use OpenVAS 9 in your environment on Ubuntu Server 16.04 for the purpose of White Hat Penetration Testing, more so it’s also written from the viewpoint of a SysAdmin who mainly works with Windows Systems (Windows Server/Hyper-V/PowerShell/suchlike) and so takes a very simplistic approach to the setup…. Read more
PowerShell script to download an RSS feed and alert when there are new posts
One of my favourite features of PowerShell is the Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet which (among a great many other things) can download the data from an RSS feed. One application I’ve found for this is to stay on top of security bulletins from organisations like Adobe and Drupal. However just downloading the data from the feed and kicking it out in an… Read more
When shutting down a Hyper-V virtual machine the Hyper-V replication state goes to critical
For the past few months I’ve been using an in house script to manage the rebooting of Virtual Machines on Hyper-V hosts following Windows Updates. These Virtual Machines also take part in Hyper-V Replica Replication to a DR host. On occasion I’ve spotted that when shutting down (as part of the reboot sequence) the Hyper-V Replica state will go into… Read more
Synology DiskStation as a Backup Target for Windows PCs and Macs
As some readers may know I currently work in Higher Education and while all of the business data is trivial to backup providing any level of backup service to students and academics is significantly harder. The challenges faced include the myriad of Operating Systems in use (Windows/OSX/Linux), the fact that the devices being backed up are inherently ‘untrusted’ (i.e. owned by the… Read more
Flashing lights and HPE ProCurve/Aruba Switches (chassislocate)
When working with a lab full of HPE ProCurve/Aruba switches (or you just want to know who is who in a stack of switches) the chassislocate CLI command comes in really handy by either blinking or holding solid the blue locator light. See the screenshots below for a little more info. ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
Aruba (by HPE) 2920s – pictures
It’s that magical time of the year where…new network switches arrive! Given that the new Aruba branding has taken full control of what was ProCurve I thought I should post some photos of the new paintwork. Happy to say the colour black isn’t half bad! Included in the images are J9729A 2920-48G-PoE+ J9728A 2920-48G J9731A 2920 2-Port 10Gbe SFP+ Module… Read more
Clients not updating from WSUS – Code 8024400E
1 Image 1 of 3 Error 8024400E appears on the clients… After recently deploying a Windows Server 2012 R2 WSUS server (afraid we couldn’t wait much longer for 2016 (which is now out by the way!)) we started seeing Error 8024400E on our clients and servers (from 2008R2/Windows 7 to Server 2012 R2/Windows 10). As it transpires Microsoft published KB3159706 for… Read more