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 […]
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 […]
Ran into a fun issue today… I had a pair of Server 2012 R2 servers in a remote office that refused to sync the proper time for their clocks. No matter what I did they were always off by five minutes. One of them was a domain controller for the office. In the process of […]
One of my glorious privileges in IT is managing and enforcing security policy for the company I work for. Being a windows shop, one of the primary tools I use to that end is Group Policy. For those of you not familiar with Group Policy, it is Microsoft’s gift (and sometimes curse) to admins such […]
In a post Heartbleed world, implementation of SSL is being scrutinized like never before (at least in my short years of experience in information security). Even though Microsoft/IIS implementations were hardly, if at all, affected by Heartbleed, they do often suffer from other common SSL vulnerabilities. This is particularly true of Microsoft Server 2003 R2 […]
Recently I had to transfer the FSMO roles in my Active Directory Domain to a new domain controller. They aren’t a particularly exciting topic or even really all that common in the grand scheme of things. However, if you do Microsoft Active Directory administration, FSMO roles are something you should at least be aware of […]
A couple of days ago I posted full instructions for integrating an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server into your Microsoft Active Directory Windows Domain. This is a short follow-up to that post which can be found here: http://www.kiloroot.com/add-ubuntu-14-04-lts-server-to-a-windows-active-directory-domain-fullest-integration/ To make my life easier I wrote three shell scripts that can be run to automate the majority […]
Update 3/31/2016 – PBIS doesn’t work well as of late and this method has been superceded by this article here: http://www.kiloroot.com/add-ubuntu-14-04-server-or-desktop-to-microsoft-active-directory-domain-login-to-unity-with-domain-credentials/ Update 5/18/2014 – I created scripts to automate 90% of this process. I still recommend you read this post before just jumping in and using the scripts so that you know what exactly it […]
I have a single DC test environment at home and I am running on old hardware. One machine’s clock had gained 3 hours. That machine happened to be the domain controller. I am running Server 2012 R2 on all machines so i used powershell to run the following commands: Check how far off the system […]
So part of my “poor-man’s hyper-v cluster” experiment in my home office here has led me to start looking into storage options for virtual platforms. Hyper-V is apparently quite flexible, however fail-over clustering limits your options. So for those of you who are just joining us I am doing research on clustered Hyper-V for work. […]
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