If you haven’t use Filezilla Server before it is a pretty decent and easy to manage FTP/FTPS solution. While I don’t care for the Filezilla client (for several reasons, one of them being that it stores saved passwords in plaintext on your machine), the server software is okay… it runs nicely on Windows Server 2012 […]
I will try to keep this short and to the point. If you work in a Windows/Linux mixed environment, you may come across a scenario where you need to move SSL certificates and private keys from a Windows server using IIS to Linux running Apache or similar. Windows and Linux tend to use two different […]
For one reason or another, there is quite a bit of confusion surrounding the technologies that allow File Sharing to take place on a Windows machine. The h Source: Windows File Sharing: Facing the Mystery Phenomenal article that clarifies Windows File sharing and sheds very clear light on which ports are needed based on what […]
Sometimes you need to mirror files between a couple of different servers in your windows environment. There are a couple of command-line tools that can be used together to make this a very easy job. To further simplify things, especially if you need to mirror the same files/folders on a recurring basis, you can drop […]
I have been doing a bit of cleaning house lately and have no less than 7 old hard drives sitting in my office. So I had a few questions to answer. First… are they usable? Second, if they aren’t, how can I securely dispose of them?
Rather than build a new Windows 7 virtual machine from scratch in hyper-v, I like to do a fresh install of one VM and then “export” it as a “template” for re-import later on. Importing a machine as a new copy is much faster than building a machine from scratch and installing Windows from an […]
To make this comparison we need to first consider the problem that both approaches help us to solve. When programming any system you are essentially dealing with data and the code that changes that data. These two fundamental aspects of programming are handled quite differently in procedural systems compared with object oriented systems, and these […]
I have been using powershell to automate Internet Explorer interactions with a web application with a login page in our internal environment at work. I ran into an issue with my script because the page I was trying to access was secured with SSL and we were using a self-signed certificate. This causes Internet Explorer […]
This is redacted version of a powershell script I had to come up with recently to fix an issue with a web application in our environment. $hostsPath = "$env:windir\System32\drivers\etc\hosts" $ip = ipconfig | findstr /i IPv4 |Out-string $ip = $ip.TrimStart("IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : ") $ip = […]
One of the things that is often handy to know is when a server was last rebooted. This is nice to know for things like patching, registry updates, etc… stuff that requires a reboot to take affect. I came across a quick article that explains a very quick way to get an answer. Open up […]
Windows Event Viewer is a gold mind of security information. However to find the nuggets you often have to chip away all of the useless “rock”. I was recently tasked with finding all of the “human” logins into a particular server in our environment for a given time period. To complicate matters, there are several […]
I recently setup a new secondary windows domain. All of the users are logging in remotely via a VPN connection and their workstations belong to a different, separate domain… I quickly found myself having to regularly administer accounts… What I needed was a password self-service tool so users could take care of simple things like […]
I decided that I wanted to give Microsoft SCCM (Systems Center Configuration Manager) 2012 a go. Three days later I almost have my install complete. A couple of hurdles I had to jump over…
We recently had a security requirement come down the line that required me to leave the wading pool of GPO administration behind and dive into the stormy waters of Powershell scripting. I am not going to dive into a full explanation of how to get started on powershell. What I am going to do is […]