my world of IT

Having recently setup a Home Assistant server (in getting ready to move home) I’ve been playing with ESPHome as a way to easily integrate my projects into the home. With a view to make life a little easier for the next person I’ve included some sample config below which can be used with the Waveshare E-Paper ESP32 and ESP8266 Driver… Read more

It’s been a while since posting and I do hope to sort that out but for now another quick mention of some work with Ruckus Cloudpath. Although massively flexible in its design I’ve come into a few niche cases where administrators would like a single DPSK pool (which is bound to a single SSID) but where different users have different… Read more

Ruckus Cloudpath is quickly turning into one of my favourite add-ons for a wireless network in a residential/University setting. It’s doing this by letting users bring all manner of ‘smart’ devices into an ‘enterprise grade’ network and connect them securely with a personal WPA2 pre shared key. Even better Cloudpath has loads of options for customizing the onboarding portal –… Read more

You may find that when doing decryption on a Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall that images in Slack channels are not displayed or are only shown in a very low resolution – in addition images cannot be uploaded. When inspecting the HTTP error messages in your browser a 503 response may also be seen. To top off the issue… Read more

An issue that I’ve now run into a few times now so I thought it was worth a blog post – if you are using the REST Custom sensor within PRTG Network Monitor you may see the error below if you have generated your REST configuration using PowerShell. XML: The returned XML does not match the expected schema. (code: PE233)… Read more

It’s a bit of an odd situation but sometimes you might want to take information from a cloud service in this case Cortex XDR from Palo Alto Networks and drag it into an on premise logging service. This guide will have a look at how to get this log data in as well as parse it such that you can… Read more

A handy trick I learnt recently from this video (ICX Serial Console Server with Raspberry Pi by Terry Henry) which I’ve condensed into this screenshot guide. In short the ‘screen’ command in Linux can be used to turn any device into a serial console server – very handy if you need ‘out of band’ access to the management console of… Read more

If you are looking to build out Zone Protection Profiles on your Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall then it can be handy to know just what your connections per second metrics look over time for each zone. Quite lucky Palo Alto Networks have a little (although not entirely descript) guide on where you can get this data – https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/pan-os/9-1/pan-os-admin/zone-protection-and-dos-protection/zone-defense/take-baseline-cps-measurements-for-setting-flood-thresholds/how-to-measure-cps.html…. Read more

Not meant as a complete in depth guide but certainly enough to point you in the right direction here’s my list of the most commonly seen (from my point of view) HPE Aruba (e.g. the 2540, 2930F, 5400R series) fibre optics and their respective part numbers: The format is effectively <Speed> <Fibre Type> <Maximum Range> – <Part Code> 1Gbit Multi… Read more

In configuring the Microsoft Intune Certificate Connector and attempting to issue certificates to your client via Intune you might run into the error message below. IssuePfx – COMException: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80094800): The requested certificate template is not supported by this CA. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80094800)at CERTENROLLLib.IX509CertificateRequestPkcs10V2.InitializeFromTemplateName (X509CertificateEnrollmentContext Context, String strTemplateName) at Microsoft.Management.Services.NdesConnector.MicrosoftCA.GetCertificate (PfxRequestDataStorage pfxRequestData, String& certificate, String& password) Failed to issue… Read more