The last few years have seen increased pressure on the existing network infrastructure and this has exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as millions of people work and study from home. This brings up the need for networks to use robust strategies such as load balancing, the ability to scale resources dynamically and implement superior routing […]
ELB Health Check Guide
Find Password Expiration for Active Directory User
Finding the Password Expiration for Active Directory Users is a Crucial step in understanding security Measures in your networks! We found an Easy Way todo this Task!
Best Remote Desktop Connection Manager for Multiple RDP Sessions
Here’s our Picks for the Best Remote Desktop Connection Manager to Ensure you dont lose any Remote Desktops Connections, Passwords and More!
WSUS Client Diagnostic Tools & Software to Troubleshooting Windows Server Update Services
Windows Patch management is an important and yet monotonous task for system admins as they have to constantly stay on top of updates and patches, download, and install them. Microsoft eases this process to some extent with its Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Earlier known as Software Update Services, this is a network service that […]
Varonis Alternatives & Competitors for File & Permissions Analysis
Varonis is a Great Tool Overall – But If your Looking for a Replacement or Alternative to Varonis, we’ve Got the Top 5 Best Alternatives for You HERE !!!
NT Administration from the Command Line
In addition to using the GUI to create accounts and groups, the command line can be used. This is often useful when automating server setup or recovery. net user jsmith tempword /ADD /FULLNAME:”John Smith” /COMMENT:”Accounting Manager” net localgroup “Accounting Local Resource Group” /add /COMMENT:”Payroll and A/R Files” net group “Accounting Members” /ADD /COMMENT:”Members have access […]
Services Subkey Entries
Beware! Make sure you have a backup of the registry and are 100% confident of the syntax of the entries before you change anything. If you mess up, your NT system may never boot again, and you will have to reinstall NT. Try to tweak the registry indirectly whenever you can through control panel/services, system […]
Using Strace to Determine What Files a Program Opens
We were recently configuring AIDE, and didn’t pay attention to the defaults in the configuration when we compiled it, and didn’t know where aide.db.new was going to after running aide initially. Sure, lsof would work while to porgram is running; however, we needed to know what files were open while the program was running. Strace […]
In Case of Emergency… Yodel
Your servers are all monitored with Nagios. Splunk is constantly eating your logs, hence why we’ve added some alternative to splunk here. You’ve got your EPO switch, your UPS, your temperature sensors and surveillance camera. The cables are tied up as neat as a Mouseketeer’s pigtails, remote management interfaces are quietly waiting for a server […]
Using the CACLS command
The cacls command is used to edit and display file permissions on NTFS partitions. Here is a list of the options: D:\>cacls Displays or modifies access control lists (ACLs) of files CACLS filename [/T] [/E] [/C] [/G user:perm] [/R user […]] [/P user:perm […]] [/D user […]] filename Displays ACLs. /T Changes ACLs of specified […]
Changing the Default Crontab Editor
The default crontab editor is nano on some systems. This is a pain. You can change this by setting the EDITOR environment variable. In BASH: srv-4 / # set | grep EDITOR EDITOR=/bin/nano srv-4 / # which vi /usr/bin/vi srv-4 / # export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi srv-4 / # set | grep EDITOR EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi _=EDITOR srv-4 / […]
Imagine, Express, Observe, Improve, Converge
I encourage every systems administrator, engineer, or architect to watch this. The birth of new systems is presented in three stages: bootstrapping, configuration, and command and control. These stages are analyzed with traditional procedures vs. the vision of Adam and Ezra of a better way. Bootstrapping is facilitated by cloud computing; configuration focuses on expressions […]
Our Favorite NT Registry Entries
Beware! Make sure you have a backup of the registry and are 100% confident of the syntax of the entries before you change anything. If you mess up, your NT system may never boot again, and you will have to reinstall NT. Try to tweak the registry indirectly whenever you can through control panel/services, system […]
One off Administration and Testing Scripts Using Vi
If you have a list of servers, you can use the substitution feature in vi to quickly turn that list into a test script. For instance, if I want to test a list of domains that looks like this: domain1.com domain2.com domain3.com domain4.com domain5.com I can insert text before and after the domain name. Here […]
Retrieving Group Membership for Active Directory from the Command Line
To create a list of regular users in an Active Directory group using the CLI: dsquery group domainroot -name groupname | dsget group -members | dsget user -fn -ln fn ln John Brown Bill Smith dsget succeeded
Pstools freeware from Sysinternals
One problem with upgrading software remotely is that you often need to stop the software you are upgrading first. Often, there is no service that can be stopped. The process must be killed. This can be a bit nasty with Windows systems because there is no easy way to find all instances of a particular […]
Vim With Spell Checking
There is a new version of Vim that will do spell checking. We used version 7.0131 available here. Grab the source, extract, compile, and install: [root@www src]# cd vim7 [root@www vim7]# ls vim-7.0131.zip [root@www vim7]# unzip *.zip Archive: vim-7.0131.zip Vim 7 snapshot version 7.0131 inflating: src/README.txt inflating: src/arabic.c inflating: src/arabic.h inflating: src/ascii.h inflating: src/buffer.c . […]
Using Cygwin for Automated File Transfer
Although Windows 2000 can be set up using proprietary (Well… MSified) secure connections via IPSec, there are a variety of problems. Most notable is the difficulty to get secure connections to work across multiple platforms, even between different Windows products. It is quite easy to create keys and pull files securely over the Internet from […]
Determining System Properties with Java
In this article we displayed our system properties via Tomcat. We were curious, though, how to retrieve these directly through Java. Here is how you can do this: [usr-1@srv-1 java]$ cat FirstProperties.java public class FirstProperties { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println(“System Information: \n”); System.out.println(“Operating System: “); System.out.println(System.getProperty(“os.name”)); System.out.println(“\nArchitecture: “); System.out.println(System.getProperty(“os.arch”)); System.out.println(“\nOperating System Version: […]
Using VB to Create an Administration Console
There are many tasks that you may want to automate using a custom console. This could be for your Jr. Systems Administrators, for users, or for yourself. One tool that we like to use for this is Visual Tcl, but sometime it is nice to use plain old Visual Basic. If you do use Visual […]
