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 OS you are running. Excellent!

Webmin is a web-based system administration tool for Unix-like systems. It provides an easy alternative to command line system administration and can be used to manage various aspects of a system, such as users and services, through the use of the pro

Source: How To Install Webmin with SSL on Ubuntu 14.04 | DigitalOcean

 

No need to re-invent the wheel by writing another article :), the above tutorial works quite well on Ubuntu 14.04+

Cheers!

Open VPN Access Server uses NAT (Network Address Translation) to “ease” routing VPN user traffic to the rest of a remote network. This isn’t always a desirable configuration.

If you want to disable NAT globally, you can do so by logging into the shell as a root user on your OpenVPN Access Server and doing the following:

cd /usr/local/openvpn_as/scripts
./sacli --key vpn.server.nat --value false ConfigPut
./sacli start

This globally disables NAT on the box and you can then use routing tables on your network to manage traffic flow. This is handy when you already have an established network with a device (or two) that are handling routing for you and will definitely fit some use cases.

For clarity’s sake I will go ahead and state the following: This is for OpenVPN ACCESS SERVER, not for the open-source/free community edition. They are very different beasts so take note of which you are using.

References:

https://docs.openvpn.net/docs/access-server/openvpn-access-server-command-line-tools.html

If you are in a decently secure network your Active Directory domain controllers are “silo’d” off from all of your workstations and member servers. This is good, however, if your internal firewalls aren’t configured properly it can cause all kinds of headache for day-to-day domain operations.

Update: You might also want to checkout this article about Windows File Sharing – what ports are used and why? It answers a lot of basic questions about Windows File sharing technology and debunks a lot of misinformation (a lot of which you probably believe if you have been a Windows Admin for any length of time like myself…): Windows File Sharing: Facing the Mystery

So to that point, I have compiled a quick list of ports that need to be open in both directions for your domain to function appropriately (This was updated on 3-27-2017 to add TCP 5722… Somehow I missed this one for a long time…):
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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 it all into an old-school .bat file and run it with the click of the mouse or then launch it via task scheduler. I found myself in need of doing just this recently and I came up with this script (all of my specific-use info has been cleansed/replaced): (more…)