my world of IT

As anyone who has been keeping tabs on my work will know I’ve recently started making use of GitHub (https://github.com/jamesfed) but was quite surprised today when logging in and I received the message below. Your account has been flagged. Because of that, your profile is hidden from the public. If you believe this is a mistake, contact support to have… Read more

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

Having recently setup OpenVAS (something I will likely blog about in further detail soon) I have found out that the default out of box deployment of Aruba-OS (formally ProCurve) supports a number of insecure SSH Algorithms with messages similar to the ones below logged even when running the latest firmware releases (YA.16.03.0004 on the 2530 series). SSH Weak Encryption Algorithms Supported… Read more

If you are running (or use) the Sympa Mailing List but also use Windows PowerShell then you may want to be aware of PSSympa which recently went v1.0 on GitHub and the PowerShell Gallery. In this release we have… Functions Get-SympaLogin (to login and get a session cookie – the result of which is used with all other functions) Get-SympaMailingListMember… Read more

With the continued rise of ‘Next Generation’ Anti-Virus like Sophos Intercept X and PaloAlto Traps the question from many SysAdmins might be well how do I deploy these? If you are looking at Intercept X and you already are Running Sophos Central (with Endpoint Protection) the simple answer is a press a few buttons in the Admin Console. In short,… Read more

Over the past year or so I’ve come to realise that although my Surface Pro 3 (i5/4GB/128GB) is an awesome machine I just don’t take it out of the house as much as I should be for fear of breaking it. On that note I’ve decided to sell it and in turn replace it with a true beast of the… Read more

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

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

While carrying out the steps to move our network devices from a flat network to one with purposeful VLANs I had changed the IP address of one of our HP CP3505 printers (using the web based management console) to discover that with the new IP I could not print to the printer over the network. Oddly enough the web based… Read more

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