The ramblings of a computer geek
Its recommended to manage your EC2 instances via SSM if/when you need console access rather than using SSH which can pose a security risk. Of course if you need to get or put files into the EC2 instance this can be a bit tricky, however if you have an S3 bucket available you can use … Read more
BASH Prompt via SSM by Default To set the BASH as the default prompt when using SSM, within the AWS Console browse to: Then add the following: Then attempt to login via SSM, you should now find you are getting the BASH prompt. Fancy Colours Edit the .bashrc file within the user home directory and set as … Read more
As a test we are using OpenSSL to perform some credentials testing using an Enterprise Application configured in Microsoft 365 to connect using IMAP(S) and SMTP via OpenSSL to validate how OAuth modern authentication works. Create Enterprise Application Firstly we create an Enterprise Application, we are going to be using Win64 OpenSSL v3.3.3 Light on … Read more
Sometimes SMTP servers what a particular EHLO/HELO argument for connecting clients, you can make Thunderbird do this by setting a new setting Settings->Config Editor, then add the following setting: mail.smtpserver.smtp1.hello_argument Specifying what you want Thunderbird to announce itself as.
If you want to use OpenSSL on Microsoft Windows, there are a number of packages provided that allow you to do this, in this example we’ll use Shinning Light Production’s OpenSSL MSI Package. Step 1 – Download and Install OpenSSL Download the installer from: https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html, I used Win64 OpenSSL v3.3.3 Light, but there may be … Read more
A simple BASH script that you can run as a CRON job to check if a particular string is present in a file, and if not it sends you an email to say the file no longer has a particular string. And the email send just uses sendmail (assuming that is installed and configured). You … Read more
We needed to determine the “fingerprint” of a x509 certificate which was present within SAML2 XML Metadata as part of an update of the metadata during a swap from using Shibboleth IdP as our IdP with using OpenAthens IdP instead. You’ll need to have your own source Metadata from which you want to extract the … Read more
Although it may not be useful to most unless you are using the OpenAthens with Shibboleth IdP, I though running through some SAML request debugging which shows how you can take apart a SAML request, rewrite it and then re-encode it to assist in debugging or testing. The purpose of this was to test the … Read more
The Microsoft Exchange Poison Queue is a little known queue on an on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server, maybe I’ve been lucky, but I’ve only seen emails end up here once in my time using Exchange Server which goes back to Exchange 5.5. However this week, we observed some messages going into the Poison Queue which were … Read more
Was working recently with some colleagues on their coursework, where they had a need to configure a Cisco ASA Firewall to prepare a network topology that met certain criteria. They were using Cisco Packet Tracer, but were having a problem creating sub-interfaces (for each VLAN), it seemed that Cisco Packet Tracer (or the current version … Read more