The ramblings of a computer geek
Tristan Self 
On the 2nd November 2002, the SSL certificate for the site expired, however now 1and1 IONOS seem to no longer allow SSL certificates to be used on their web hosting if they do not also hold and manage the DNS and domain. Pretty poor show, but I expect its something to do with ensuring the … Read more
You may find you need to perform a check where the FQDN you are monitoring doesn’t correspond to the IP address and some form of virtual server (or host headers) are in use. Now normally using a command like: Should just work however in certain instances depending on the configuration of the web server you’ll … Read more
If you are having trouble uploading a file via SCP to vCenter then VMware provide a great document on how to resolve this. You’ll be seeing an error like: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107727 Essentially what you need to do is logon via SSH to vCenter, swap the Shell to BASH, upload the file, then swap the Shell back … Read more
Running a disk test need not be complicated. Microsoft provide a cheeky little hard disk test program that can be used, you can download it from https://github.com/microsoft/diskspd. A simple run can be completed with the following command to test the hard drive performance based on the parameters entered. If you wish you can add “> … Read more
Hashing allows you to create a message digest of a file, essentially a summary of the file, so you can determine if that file has changed during transit. It has lots of purposes such as ensuring non-repudiation, but in this example I’m using the MD5 hash to verify that the file has been downloaded correctly. … Read more
We were performing the migration to new Distributed Switches (running a later version) ready for our vCenter 7.x and ESXi 7.x upgrade and when attempting to remove a host from a distributed switch we got this error: VMware has an article KB76959 that describes this issue, however in our case rather than the VM (or … Read more
The collection of user requirements can be a difficult and time-consuming process, working towards Agile principles the collection of requirements should be a collaborative process helping the requestor (customer/colleague) to discover what they want through requirements collection sessions to build a document that contains the necessary information for the design teams to build a solution … Read more
So in performing an emergency workaround for a zero-day on a Microsoft Exchange server, I came across a term: URI. It’s something I’ve met before, but then realised, what actually is a URI? So I set out to find out and like many things went down a rabbit hole! In this article I’ll try to … Read more
After an update Microsoft Exchange 2016 – Security Update For Exchange Server 2016 CU22 (KB5015322), following the upgrade the following appeared: The Exchange server appeared to operating fine, mail flow was fine, the DAG operating as expected, users who are using ActiveSync, Exchange Anywhere or EWS all appeared to have no problems. However using OWA … Read more
Moniting with SNMPv3 is much like monitoring with SNMPv2 or 1 for that matter, except SNMPv3 offers greater security options. SNMPv1 or v2 offers very little security being based on a plain text community string, of course on the monitored device you can restrict which hosts are allowed to connect to your monitored device via … Read more