TotalDebug

Git allows so much flexibility, Over the past few months I have improved my workflows and documented this here

Github Pages only support certain Jekyll plugins, find out how to mitigate this issue

The following short article runs through how to setup docker to use overlay2 with Centos for use in production

One of the most difficult things I found out about 3d printing was that you must calibrate it! This isnt something that I was aware of, I assumed once everything was tightened that it would just work, I was so wrong!

About 6 months ago I entered a competition with DrZzs (highly recommend his channel for home automation) and BangGood to win a Creality Ender 3 3D Printer.

I have had a lot of issues when setting up teaming with WiFi, mainly because of lack of documentation around this, im guessing that teaming ethernet and WiFi is not a common occurrence especially with a hidden SSID.

I have recently been looking into CI and CD, mainly for use at home with my various projects etc. but also to further my knowledge.

When using my L2TP VPN with the Unifi I realised that it was assigning a different IP Address to my client when it connected sometimes.

Recently I had a requirement to setup a content filter on the USG for a client. I couldn’t find much information online so have decided to write this article to show others how to do this

Today I had to renew SSL certificates for a vCloud Director 8.10 cell which had expired.

In this video i will take you through installing Docker on CentOS and some of the most common basic commands you will need to work with Docker.

In this video I talk about what Docker is, how it can be used and how containerisation differs from virtualisation.

Git is an open source, version control system (VCS). It’s commonly used for source code management by developers to allow them to track changes to code bases throughout the product lifecycle, with sites like GitHub offering a social coding experience, and multiple popular projects utilising it great functionality and availability for Open Source sharing.

When working with JUNOS Switches etc. you may want to monitor the logs over a period of time without loading them every few minutes and scrolling to the bottom?

Working with CentOS quite a lot I have spent time looking for configurations that work for various issues, one I have seen recently that took me a long time to resolve and had very poor documentation around the net was setting up an L2TP VPN.

Ubiquiti’s provide a Controller version for other distributions of linux but only display debian on their site, but if you’re running CentOS or another Linux distribution, you’ll have to use the generic controller package. The upgrade provess is so simple! (i have also written this script that makes it even quicker)

I have recently had loads of trouble setting up a Ubiquiti UniFi USG remote user VPN, the USG requires a RADIUS server in order to function correctly, the following article covers this setup freeRADIUS Setup

I have recently purchased a load of Ubiquiti UniFi equipment, as part of this i have the UniFi USG which in order to deploy a User VPN requires a RADUIS Server for user authentication. This article will run through how to install and set this up.

This is a short simple guide to assist users with installing the Ubiquiti UniFi Controller required for all UniFi devices on a CentOS 7 Server.

As we all move to a digital age, adding more and more personal information to the internet security has become a real issue, in recent years there have been hack attempts on well-known brands, including LastPass, LinkedIn, Twitter and Adobe.

This is something that I was unaware of until recently when I was looking into the usage of V-Vols. It appears that VMware have made some major improvements to the ways we handle snapshots and consolidate them in vSphere 6.0 with VVols. Most people who use VMware are aware of limitations with snapshots on VMs that have heavy IO or large snapshots attached to them. In a large number of cases we see snapshots fail to remove and then require hours of downtime to actually consolidate.

This tutorial takes you through setting up Teamspeak 3 on CentOS 7, I will also be going through using a MariaDB database for the backend and a custom system services script.

When deploying a Teamspeak3 server one thing that is vital for the first time startup is to make a note of the privilege key, but what do you do if for some reason you didn’t write it down?

As most of you will now be aware VMware decided to end availability for vCloud Director and shift to only allow service providers to utilise the product.

Recently I have been playing in my lab with VCSA and vCNS, I found that when I tried to connect to the vCenter I received this error:

There are multiple ways to tell if a virtual machine has thick or thin provisioned VM Disk. Below are some of the ways I am able to see this information:

I was recently asked if it was possible to update vCenter alarms in bulk with email details. So i set about writing the below script, basically this script will go through looking for any alarms that match the name you specify and set the email as required.

In this article I will be showing you guys the new ESXi Embedded Host Client, this has been long awaited by many users of the Free ESXi host and allows much better management of the host.

I spent quite some time trying to get the OpenVPN Server working on the Mikrotik Router with a Linux client, It caused some pain and I didnt want others to go through that. I have therefore written this guide, taking you from certificate creation all the way to VPN connectivity.

What is TPS?

One of the great virtualization and VMware features is the ability to take snapshots of a virtual machine. The snapshot feature allows an IT administrator to make a restore point of a virtual machine, with the option to make it crash consistent. This feature is particularly useful when performing upgrades or testing, as if anything goes wrong during the process, you can quickly go back to a stable point in time (when the snapshot was taken).

Recently I have seen an issue after upgrading some of our Dell R6xx hosts to 5.5 U2, they started showing FCoE in the storage adapters and booting took a really long time.

In this article I will be showing you how to add vCenter logs to a syslog server, I currently use GrayLog2 as its a great free syslog server and does everything that I require.

This article covers the deployment on the vCenter 6.0 VCSA, you will see that this process is radically different from previous processes.

What is NUMA?

This is a very short and sweet article documenting the offline upgrade process from 5.5 to 6.0

In this article I am going to take you through what a Distributed switch or dvSwitch is and how it is used, I will also talk about why backing them up is so important, then show you how to backup by hand and with the help of some PowerShell scripts I have created for you.

It is my experience that resource pools are nearly a four letter word in the virtualization world. Typically I see a look of fear or confusion when I bring up the topic, or I see people using them as folders. Even with some other great resources out there that discuss this topic, a lack of education remains on how resource pools work, and what they do. In this post, I’ll give you my spin on some of the ideals behind a resource pool, and then discuss ways to properly balance resource pools by hand and with the help of some PowerShell scripts I have created for you.

In order to correctly log Cisco device in Graylog2 setup the below configuration.

I recently required a syslog server that was easy to use with a web interface to monitor some customers firewalls. I had been looking at Splunk but due to the price of this product it was not a viable option for what I required.

By default Teamspeak 3 uses a SQLite database, most people tend to use this however for those of us that prefer MySQL there is a way to change it.

Over the past couple of weeks I have spent some time working with VMware vCloud Director 5.1. I will also be producing multiple other guides for vCloud Director as I use it more over the coming months.

About NFS (Network File System) Mounts

I have recently had an issue with people leaving snapshots on VM’s for too long causing large snapshots and poor performance on Virtual Machines.

This article provides various hardening tips for your Linux server.

NOTE: As of Version 3.0.11.1 this tutorial is no longer applicable. I will soon re-write this to accommodate the latest version.

One of the things I wanted to do was migrate my teamspeak server from SQLite to MySQL so I created the below which makes the migration easy.

I have recently had a lot of issues with Cisco ASDM on new installs of Windows 7 and upwards.

In this article I will be talking you through how to use rSnapshot and rSync to backup your server with an email alert when the backup has been completed and what has been backed up.

The following Tutorial walks you through how to setup authentication using a key pair to negotiate the connection, stopping the requirement for passwords.

This is a question that I have been asked quite a lot recently. I have found multiple ways to do this but 2 are ones that I have used and find the most suitable.

I have recently setup two factor authentication on my server using Google Authenticator, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you guys the way I achieved this and some issues I bumped into along the way.

There are multiple ways to save application settings/configurations in PHP. You can save them in INI, XML or PHP files as well as a database table. I prefer a combination of the latter two; saving the database connection details in a PHP file and the rest in a database table.

I have had a few times when coding where I get the error PHP Notice: Undefined Index, I found the below solution to this issue which is an extremely simple fix!

Here you will find all commands what would help you to recreate all Virtual Directories for Exchange 2007. You can also use just a few of them. But never delete or create it in IIS. This has to be done under Exchange Management Shell (don’t get mixed with the Windows Powershell):

When using Office 365 and sharepoint 2010 you may find that trying to open a library in explorer will result in this error:

How to correctly set-up folder redirection permissions for My Documents, Start Menu and Desktop. I have worked on many company computer systems where this hadn’t been done correctly resulting in full access to all files and folders, as an outsider I had access to other peoples my documents from my laptop without being on the domain! Following this article will stop that happening to your data.

I had a requirement for some of our security camera servers to login automatically now on a normal standalone computer this is easy but on a domain it gets more complicated.

Here are my notes on upgrading a Catalyst 3560. I plugged in a laptop to the serial console and an ethernet cable into port 1 (technically interface Gigabit Ethernet 0/1). Here is the official Cisco documentation I followed. It’s for the 3550, but the Cisco support engineer said that it’s close enough.

OK so I had an issue that Microsoft released an update for Windows XP that I needed to install but they didn’t do an MSI so I couldn’t deploy is using GPO which was a real pain.

One of our customers was getting the below error and it took ages to find a solution so I thought I would post it here.

Ok so this one had me stumped for a LONG time trying to figure out how to get scanners to authenticate to office 365 in the end i found out that the scanner i was using wasnt supported in this format so i found this work around hope it helps you!

It was brought to my attention that following the steps listed in KB327000 (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=327000), which applies to Exchange 2000 and 2003, to assign a user “Send As” permission as another user did not appear to work.  I too tried to follow the steps and found that they did not work. I know this feature works, so I went looking around for other documentation on this and found KB281208 (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=281208) which applies to Exchange 5.5 and 2000.  Following the steps in KB281208 properly gave an user “Send As” permission as another user. But I found the steps listed in KB281208 were not complete either. The additional step that I performed was to remove all other permissions other than “Send As”.  Here are the modified steps for KB281208 that I performed (changes noted in blue):

Windows provides several methods to view processes remotely on another computer. Terminal Server is one way or you can use the command line utility pslist from Microsoft Sysinternals site. While both options are good alternatives, Windows XP and Vista provides a built in utility for viewing and killing process on remote Computers using Tasklist and Taskkill commands.

Hi Guys,

I Came across an issue today where i needed to reinstall terminal services licensing but when you do this licensing is lost and needs to be re-applied.

Ok so i had a customer that wanted to block iGoogle but allow google which turns out to be tricky as the only way to tell the difference is by the gadgets and the title bar.
i tried to do some research about iGoogle: every sites of iGoogle what I tested has the same title in html source code. Exactly:

Ok so today i was doing some PHP coding and get the dreaded header error caused me a bit of a headache as i needed to redirect some pages. After a bit of searching i managed to find an alternative to using:

Ok so today I had a customer come to me saying that when they map a network drive in NT4 the user details don’t get remembered when the pc is rebooted.

Send on Behalf and Send As are similar in fashion. Send on Behalf will allow a user to send as another user while showing the recipient that it was sent from a specific user on behalf of another user. What this means, is that the recipient is cognitive of who actually initiated the sending message, regardless of who it was sent on behalf of. This may not be what you are looking to accomplish. In many cases, you may want to send as another person and you do not want the recipient to be cognitive about who initiated the message. Of course, a possible downside to this, is that if the recipient replies, it may go to a user who did not initiate the sent message and might be confused depending on the circumstances. Send As can be useful in a scenario where you are sending as a mail-enabled distribution group. If someone replies, it will go to that distribution group which ultimately gets sent to every user who is a part of that distribution group. This article will explains how to use both methods.

One thing that I had problems with the first time I installed Veeam was the ability to backup Virtual Machines directly from the SAN. Meaning that instead of proxying the data through an ESXi host, the data would flow from SAN to backup server directly. The benefits of this process are very clear… reduced CPU and network load on the ever so valuable ESXi resources.

It sometimes happens (and it’s not a good sign most of the time): you’d like to stop a Windows Service, and when you issue the stop command through the SCM (Service Control Manager) or by using the ServiceProcess classes in the .NET Framework or by other means (net stop, Win32 API), the service remains in the state of stopping and never reaches the stopped phase. It’s pretty simple to simulate this behavior by creating a Windows Service in C# (or any .NET language whatsoever) and adding an infinite loop in the Stop method. The only way to stop the service is by killing the process then. However, sometimes it’s not clear what the process name or ID is (e.g. when you’re running a service hosting application that can cope with multiple instances such as SQL Server Notification Services). The way to do it is as follows:

Time synchronization is an important aspect for all computers on the network. By default, the clients computers get their time from a Domain Controller and the Domain Controller gets his time from the domain’s PDC Operation Master. Therefore the PDC must synchronize his time from an external source. I usually use the servers listed at the NTP Pool Project website. Before you begin, don’t forget to open the default UDP 123 port (in- and outbound) on your firewall.

You can use Group Policy Editor to make the **Shutdown** button unavailable in the **Log On to Windows** dialog box that appears when you press CTRL+ALT+DELETE on the Welcome to Windows screen.