The ramblings of a computer geek
The Nissan LEAF provides limited information via the normal information systems in the car as to what is going on with the drive train and more specifically the battery. However, there is an phone app that is available for Apple IOS and Android called “LEAFSpy Pro” that can provide you with detailed information; something that … Read more
We use SMTP on our Exchange Servers to provide authenticated SMTP email service for those who are using email clients which require SMTP to send email. We had an issue that following a certificate expiry that any SMTP connections to the server (that were attempting to use STARTTLS) would fail. For example: The issue was … Read more
VMware gives the capability to “snapshot” a powered on or powered off virtual machine, preserving its state at a particular point in time. Although this is a very useful feature, is it not intended as a long term backup, archive or for example a pre-upgrade/change state backup. A snapshot allows an administrator to create a … Read more
The Palo Alto Firewall GUI is really slick, but sometimes its handy to create using the CLI, perhaps if you have a large number of changes that need to be made at once. Within this example, we’ll create a zone, then an Interface (on an Aggregate Interface), give it an IP address, apply a management … Read more
We had an issue where a recent Windows update broke the Exchange Server, luckily booting into safe mode and removing it resolved the issue, however although the databases mounted okay, there was one that did not. We attempted the typical ESEUTIL steps because it was reporting “dirty shutdown”, and got the database back to a … Read more
Multicast is a networking method used to efficiently transmit data to multiple recipients simultaneously. Unlike unicast (one-to-one) and broadcast (one-to-all) communication, multicast is a one-to-many or many-to-many method where data is sent only to devices that are interested in receiving it, rather than to all devices on a network. In multicast, devices that want to … Read more
You can install VMware PowerCLI via either the online installer, i.e direct into PowerShell, or via an offline installer. The offline installer instructions can be found here. For online installation, you can perform the following steps: Step 1 – Open PowerShell, you may need to “Run as Administrator”. Step 2 – Install all PowerCLI modules … Read more
VMware HA (High Availability) is a great feature, but if the failure occurs when you are not watching it you may well need to know what was affected. You can use VMware PowerCLI to query vCenter for the VMs that have been affected by a host failure causing an HA restart event. I’m assuming that … Read more
Sometimes you have some kit that is just old and isn’t supporting the recent (and secure) key algorithms, if you need to connect (with some consideration of the security implications) you can use something like the below. The “-v” means verbose, you can see when connecting what the end point is offering, then you can … Read more
I had a need to be able to show up a row if a date in that row had fallen out of compliance, e.g. list of assets, with a “Last Patch” date on it. If the “Last Patch” date is more than X days (e.g. 90 days) before today, then show it up. At the … Read more