Terraform – AWS Assign Pre-existing Elastic IP Address to an EC2 Instance

Elastic IP Addresses (EIP) are great as they provide you with a static IP address which you can use for an endpoint to your application, but when you are automating things with Terraform, you don’t want it to be continually re-created or that IP address will change, and if you have DNS records pointing at […]

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Nissan LEAF mk2 2022 – LEAFSpy Pro and OBDII

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 […]

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Exchange 2016 SMTP StartTLS “Didn’t find STARTTLS in server response”

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 […]

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VMware Snapshots – Some Thoughts and Best Practice

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 […]

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Palo Alto Firewall – Command Line Example (Interface and Access Rules)

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 […]

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Microsoft Exchange 2016 Database not Mounting

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 […]

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Multicast – IGMP Snooping and IGMP Querier – Sender and Reciever(s) in same VLAN/Layer 2 Segment

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 […]

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VMware PowerCLI Discover VMs Restarted by VMware HA (Host Failure)

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 […]

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