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When we moved into our new house five years ago, the electrical installation came with a full KNX bus: lights, blinds, heating actuators, the garage door, a weather station, all wired up and configured through ETS by the electrician. On top of that we had a handful of separate smart-home ecosystems that had nothing to do with KNX: a Reolink camera setup, a Zehnder ComfoAirQ ventilation system, a…
I scan all my incoming mail into Paperless-ngx. Nothing fancy, just regular letters and correspondence, duplex, 300 dpi, color. The volume isn’t huge, but it annoyed me every single time: a duplex page took 45 seconds to go through the ADF of my Epson WorkForce Pro WF-C5890. That’s a long time to stare at a scanner for a single sheet of paper, and it was bugging me enough to actually…
Every time I tried to clone or pull from a remote Git repository over SSH on Windows, I got hit with this: PS C:\Development\Forgejo> git clone ssh://git@forgejo.blazilla.de/patrick/Dotfiles.git Dotfiles Cloning into 'Dotfiles'... git@forgejo.blazilla.de: Permission denied (publickey). fatal: Could not read from remote repository. Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the…
I’ve been a Windows user for over 30 years. With a brief detour to Linux on the desktop in the early 2000s, every machine I owned was running Windows, both private and professional. I always had a soft spot for macOS, but something always got in the way. The price premium, the butterfly keyboard disaster, the missing ports, the Touch Bar, or simply software I relied on that wasn’t…
If you’d like to hear me talk about IT, data centers, cloud, and other tech-related topics, feel free to tune in to one of these podcasts: Wartungsfenster Faxinformatiker TechnikTechnik
One of my customers is running a five node Nutanix cluster, which is configured for FT2 (2N/2D). This means, that if the storage containers are configured with RF3, two of the five nodes can fail. Now I stumbled over the “Cluster Resiliency / Fault Tolerance Status” widget on the dashboard, which clearly showed that only a single node failure would be tolerated. This was a bit…
This really annoying issue was hunting me for several weeks until I discovered the root cause. One of my customers is running VMware ESXi on top of HPE ProLiant DX hardware, the customized Hardware from HPE for Nutanix. It’s simply a ProLiant DL with a specific set of available components, firmware, drivers and branding. Instead of running AHV, this customer chose to run VMware ESXi as…
I’m a loyal Apple iPhone and T-Mobile customer for many years. Recently, it came to my attention, that there is a voicemail service active on my personal mobile number. This is pretty annoying, as I never use voicemail on my private mobile number. Okay, maybe due to an update or something. I quickly found the standard mobile code to disable any forwardings: ##002# is a standard mobile code…
The HPE iLO Amplifier Integration into the vSphere Lifecycle Manager is an easy way to update your ESXi hosts not only with updates, but also with the latest firmware. Despite the fact that HPE has discontinued HPE ILO Amplifier , the product is widly used. The final version is 2.22, the final version for the HPE iLO Amplifier HSM Provider for VMware vSphere is version 1.5.0. A recurring problem…
Sometimes you need to decomission services, and move them to new servers. Sometimes this requires the change of the IP address. This is no big deal as long as accessing clients use DNS, or until you can change the IP address to connect to the services using a central mechanism. DNS and LDAP are two of these services. They come often as part of Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controllers.…
We all know the e-mail disclamer and “EXTERNAL” tags in subject lines that should make clear, that a specific e-mail is coming from external sender. Mostly this is done to make sure nobody clicks on links in external e-mails that might look like an external e-mail. This can easily be done by creating a transport rule in Exchange or Exchange Online that matches senders outside the…
After a routine update of a 6-node Nutanix cluster, a Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) warning popped up indicating a problem with the SAS cabling. Running the check on the CLI offered some more details. Running : health_checks hardware_checks disk_checks hpe_hba_cabling_check [==================================================] 100% /health_checks/hardware_checks/disk_checks/hpe_hba_cabling_check […
The Certificate Enrollment Policy Web Service (CEP) and the Certificate Enrollment Web Service (CES) were introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2 in order to simplify the request for certificates, especially for devices that were not member of a Active Directory domain. The “classic” way of requesting a certificate from a Active Directory Enterprise CA involves LDAP and RPC/ DCOM, which…
By default, credentials such as RADIUS or TACACS authentication keys, are stored separately from the switch configuration, and are not shown when saved or running configurations are displayed or copied using TFTP or SSH. You can change this behavior using the include-credentials command. This clearly seems to be a security issue, because the displays credentials are unencrypted. You can check the…
Some weeks ago I decided to move my notes from Microsoft OneNote to Joplin. Microsoft OneNote is a great tool for taking notes collaborative, but sometimes it drives me insane and I wanted a more portable form at for my notes. Markdown is a perfect portable format, and it is widly adopted. I really like the idea behind Markdown, and I even supported a Microsoft User Voice to add native Markdown…
Many of you might know Pi-hole and use it for blocking ADs. I also used it for a long time in my homenetwork, running it on a Raspberry Pi. A customer of mine then drew my attention to dnsforge.de . What is dnsforge.de? dnsforge.de is a censorship-free, secure and redundant DNS resolver without logging, but with an ad blocker. The server are hosted in Germany. dnsforge.de also offers…
This is a quick one. Sometimes you need to evacuate VMs from a host, do some maintenance, and redistribute the VMs to the originating host. This can be annoying, especially if you don’t have a vSphere Enterprise Plus license with DRS, DRS groups etc. These few PowerShell lines may help you. ,
In May 2022, Broadcom announced that it will buy VMware for outstanding $69 billion USD. 18 months later, in November 2023, China finally approved the merger. Chinese regulators were the latest in a long line of authorities to approve the takeover. VMware was gone. It was no “by Broadcom”. And not only the name changed. There were already countless rumors in the 18 months before the…
This blog will mark its 10th anniversary in January 2024. A decade ago, I embarked on a new blogging journey with the domain vcloudnine.de. Some of you might have known my former blog before I made the switch to vcloudnine.de. I’d been running blazilla.de for over 7 years. However, by the end of 2013, I grew weary of Serendipity, a PHP-powered weblog engine. I craved a shift to Wordpress,…
Hello, and welcome to vcloudnine.de! I’m Patrick, born in 1981, originally from the Ruhr area, but now settled in the Eifel region (about 50 km from Cologne). In the early 2000s, I completed an apprenticeship at a local IT company and later earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from FernUniversität Hagen. I have more than two decades of experience in IT, and I started this blog in 2014…
Englisch This website is a private project. For any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out via Mail or Mastodon . This site does not use cookies, logs are limited to technically necessary information, and no data is collected or evaluated at any time. Emails can also be sent encrypted and/or signed (S/MIME or PGP) if desired. Deutsch Bei dieser Webseite handelt es sich um ein…
Usually I tend to use the iPhone WiFi hotspot feature. But lately, I had to switch to USB tethering, because I had to work a whole workday using the hotspot feature. USB tethering saves battery and the connection was more reliable for me. Please note, that you need to install iTunes to use USB tethering, because the necessary Ethernet driver is only available with iTunes. Without this driver,…
While chilling on my couch, I stumbled over this pretty interesting Reddit thread: Story Time - How I blew up my company’s AD for 24 hours and fixed it : sysadmin (reddit.com) Long story short: A poor guy applied some STIG hardening and his Active Directory blew up. Root cause was disabling RC4, which caused Kerberos failures, primarily documented by errors like “The encryption type…
In the previous blog post I have showed you how to interactively log in into the Microsoft Graph API. You had to enter a username, a password, and you had to enter a second factor. This is typically not want you want if you want to automate things. But there is another way to get access to the Microsoft Graph API. Create an app registration To get access, you have to register an app in your…
There is a new API in town… naa, not really new, but the Microsoft Graph API will replace most, if not all, other Azure AD/ Microsoft 365 APIs. Actually, Microsoft has planned to retire Azure AD Graph API and ADAL in Juni 2022. Now they have postponed this date to somewhere after December 2022. This will give you some extra time to refactor your PowerShell scrips and move them to use the…
Scrolling through my Twitter timeline is a common task to start my day. This morning, a tweet from @BleepinComputer has caught my attention. Microsoft rolls back decision to block Office macros by default - @serghei https://t.co/9BK0slNuEw — BleepingComputer (@BleepinComputer) July 7, 2022 My first reaction: WHAT. THE. FUCK?! Microsoft added this as feature 88883 in februrary 2022 to the…
Ausnahmsweise ein Blogpost in deutscher Sprache. Grund dafür ist, dass Claudia Kühn und ich seit Januar 2022 einen gemeinsamen Podcast rund um den Themenkomplex Datacenter, Cloud und IT ein. Eine lockere Kaminzimmerrunde in der wir entspannt über unseren Job, und alles was damit zu tun hat, plaudern. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0 Der Podcast erscheint alle zwei Wochen auf…
This error gets me from time to time, regardless which server vendor, mostly on hosts that were upgraded a couple of times. In this case it was a ESXi host currently running a pretty old build of ESXi 6.7 U3 and my job was the upgrade to 7.0 Update 3c. If you add a upgrade baseline to the cluster or host, and you try to remediate the host, the task fails with a dependency error. When taking a…
A customer used PRTG Network Monitor to notify him in case of account lockouts. This worked quite well until we implemented Admin Tiering. In order to get a mail notification in case of an account lockout, or other security-relevant events in Active Directory, I customized some scripts from my PowerShell dump. The solution is pretty simple: I used the Task Planner to run a PowerShell script if a…
Today I faced an interesting problem. A customer told me that their Exchange 2010, which is currently part of a Exchange cross-forest migration project, has an issue with Outlook Web Access and the Exchange Control Panel. Both web sites fail with a white screen and a single message: 440 Login Timeout I checked some basics, like certificate, configuration of the virtual directories and I found…
As part of a Office 365 tenant rebuild, I had to move a custom domain to the new Office 365 tenant. The old tenant was not needed anymore, and the customer had to move to a Non-Profit tenant for compliance reasons. So the migration itself was no big deal: disable AzureAD sync change UPN of all users remove the domain connect the domain to the new tenant setup a new AzureAD sync assign licenses…
EDIT: It seems that his was fixed in vCenter 7.0 U3 . While debugging a vCener Lifecycle Manager, which was unable to download updates, I’ve stumbled over a weird behaviour, which is (IMHO) by design. Some of you might use a proxy server. And some of you might use a proxy server which requires credentials. In my case, my customer uses a Sophos SG appliance as a web proxy server with…
Its been four month since my last blog post, and the blog frequency was quite low before that. This blog is, to be honest, a giant pile of stuff that has not worked as expected. Okay, some random thoughts or howto’s, but most blog posts are about stuff that failed in some way. That’s a bit “depressing”. I should write more about the fun things in my life For a pretty long…
Adding a second factor to your authentication is always a good idea. Typically the second factor is a One-Time Password (OTP) or a push notification. But what if you want to allow the login into your Horizon View environment only from specific devices? This implies that you need some kind of second factore that also identifies the device. At this point the arch enemy of many of us comes into play:…
Today I had to deploy a new vCenter appliance. Nothing fancy, new deployment. Stage 1 was easy, but stage 2 failed several times. I re-deployed the vCenter appliance two times, but as the deployment failed for the third time, I took a look into the logs. The deployment failed without any error, but it didn’t finished. It stopped during the start of different services without any error.…
One of my customers replaced the old Veeam environment with new gear. The HW was pretty simple designed: two HPE ProLiant per server two HPE D3610 enclosures with 6 TB disks ~ 5km between backup server and backup copy destination One server was designed to act as the Veeam backup server and repository, and the second server was designed to act as the backup copy destination. Both servers were…
Yesterday, I passed the first exam of the year. In this case the WatchGuards Network Security Essentials exam. The exam covers basic networking and firewalling skills, as well as the necessary knowledge to configure, manage, and monitor a WatchGuard Firebox. If you were familier with networking and firewalls in general, this exam is a “low hanging fruit”. I had to take it due to…
This blog post covers objective 1.1 (Gather and analyze business requirements) of the VCAP-DCV Design 2021 exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update December 2019). When you get the task to design something , you will instinctively start gathering information about the requirements that…
In August 2018 I’ve passed the VCAP6-DCV Deployment exam. After a busy first half of 2019 it’s time to start preparing the VMware Certified Advanced Professional — Data Center Virtualization Design 2019 exam. But I lost focus and in 2020 I had a lot to do - but not VMW related and so I also missed my goal to take the VCAP-DCV Design exam. I have to push myself, so I decided to re-cap…
Using physical clients as Horizon View agents is pretty common for me. My office pc, as well as my Lenovo X250 are often used by using the Horizon View Client and the Blast protocol. But as good as the performance is, there were a couple of things that bugged me. On my office pc, I encountered pretty often a black screen, either on first connect, or on reconnect. The typical issue caused by…
I just had a Teams call with a customer to resolve a strange mystery about Azure MFA. The customer called me and explained, that he has a user with Azure Multifactor Authentication (MFA) disabled, but when he logs in with this account, he is asked to setup MFA. He setup MFA and was able to login according to their Conditional Access policies. The customer and I took a look into their tenant and…
There are still customers out there that are running vCenter Server on a Windows host. This year, despite the fact that most customers have set project on hold, I managed some of them to migrate to a vCenter Server Appliance. Some days ago I had an meeting with one of my favorite customers to migrate their vCenter Server 6.5 to a vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 U3l. They were still on 6.5 because of…
One of my customers purchased a bunch of Microsoft 365 subscriptions in order to use them with Office 365 and Windows 10 Enterprise. The customer called me because he had trouble to activate the Windows 10 Enterprise license. Source: Microsoft/ microsoft.com I would like so summarize some of the requirements in order to successfuly active Windows 10 Enterprise subscriptions. License First of all,…
We have to deal with COVID19 for a year now and from the IT perspective, 2020 was a pretty strange year. Many project were not cancelled, but were placed on-hold. But two kinds of projects went through the roof: Microsoft 365, and Horizon View As you might noticed I blogged a lot about Exchange, Exchange Online and Horizon this year. The reason for this is pretty simple: That was driving my…
December 31, 2020 will not only be the end of the miserable year 2020, it will also be the end of an era - the era of Adobe Flash! Adobe has announced that they will stop supporting Adobe Flash after December 31, 2020. Furthermore, Adobe will block Flash from running in Flash Player on January 12, 2021. Adobe strongly recommends that all users immediately uninstall Flash Player. I got a popup a…
While migrating a customer from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2016, I had to create an Exchange Hybrid Deployment, because the customer wants to use Microsoft Teams. Nothing fancy and I’ve did this a couple of times. Unfortunantely the Hybrid Connection Wizard failed to create the migration endpoint. A quick check of the logs showed this error:…
A couple of days ago, I wrote about our first steps to move our on-prem stuff to Azure. This post will cover how we adopted Office 365 and how we have started with our Azure deployment. Our first step into Office 365 was Microsoft Teams. We needed a solution for calls (audio/ video) and chat. We skipped Skype 4 Business and started with Microsoft Teams. Our Microsoft Teams deployment was pretty…
During the deployment of a vSAN cluster consisting of multiple HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 hosts, I noticed a memory health warning after updating the firmware using the Support Pack for ProLiant . The error was definitely not shown before the update, so it was clear, that this was not a real issue with the hardware. Furthermore: All hosts showed this error. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative…
As part of an ongoing Exchange 2010 to 2016 migration, I had to replace the self-signed certificate with a certificate from the customers PKI. Everything went fine, the customer had a suitable template, we’ve added the necessary hostnames and bound IIS and SMTP to the certificate. The mess started with an iisreset /noforce … The iisreset took longer than expected. After that, I tried to…
It was a bit quiet here due to the current COVID 19 pandemic. But now I’m back with a pretty interesting story on how my colleagues and I moved most of our on-prem server stuff to Microsoft Azure and Office 365. It all started with the COVID19 lockdown in Germany in March 2020. We moved into our home offices after setting up a small VMware Horizon View deployment to access our PCs using…