With everything going on in the world with COVID-19 and the social distancing that is happening, people are looking to connect with friends, family and co-workers via Video conferencing more than ever. Recent vulnerabilities in Zoom have made people more cognizant than ever that security needs to be considered when using these platforms no matter what you are using them for.
Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform that I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and finally had a chance to look into. In this post I’ll explain how to use Terraform to provision a Jitsi instance when you need a conference and tear it down when you are done. We’ll be using Vultr and their Jitsi “application” and AWS Route 53 for DNS.
It’s time to ditch cloud based password managers. There.. I said it. What we are doing when we use them is giving ownership and management of our trusted secrets to someone else, and hoping that they will be able to protect them from bad guys, and make sure they are available when we need them.
That’s a heck of an ask, isn’t it? I’ve been a LastPass customer for a very, very long time.. I use it to share secrets with my family, I use it on my mobile device to log into apps. It’s a safe bet to say it’s a critical piece of how I operate, and they have never once let me down. That said, if they asked for money to continue using their service, I’d have to pay. If they had a security event where secrets were compromised or if they lost my data, I’d be in very, very bad shape.
In this article, I will talk about how to set up a WebDAV share that’s protected by HTTPS using Traefik, Let’s Encrypt, and a WebDAV container on your own server, and use it to sync your secrets with devices.
I’m not sure why it’s been so hard to find a snippet online that gives me the ability to create a linked clone while selecting a static IP address, but it was. I ended up writing a quick function to help.
Practice what you preach, right? I try to keep my root partition on my personal machine pretty anemic.. usually between 40G and 60G. However, lately I’ve been running out of space and I wasn’t sure why. Here are a few tips and tricks for finding the culprit, and freeing up some space.
So yesterday, VMware released Horizon Workspace 1.5. HUGE improvement over the GA release… Holey smokes. Any further tutorials will reference this version.
Anyways, more to the point. In this post I will demonstrate how to do a base configuration of Horizon Workspace using an internal Microsoft Certificate Authority with Nginx as a frontend. This setup is only acceptable for setting up workspace in a lab environment, since in a production environment you’ll need a trusted third party cert. Doing this in a lab environment is important because it will allow you to set up and test every feature you’ll be using in a production environment.
Requirements:
Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services
Linux Machine running Nginx
Horizon Workspace 1.5 Downloaded and installed with no configuration.
We’ll be using the workspace FQDN of hzn.test.in (This obviously assumes the domain of test.in)
I’ve been working with Horizon Workspace since it went GA in March. At this point in time, I’m happy to say that I’ve got Workspace set up in a production environment.
In this series, I will be covering how I configured each part of this suite. I would expect that this process will become exponentially easier as time goes on. One thing to note is that I will write these posts assuming that you are at least moderately familiar with linux and Workspace. I will not go into details on how to install packages, deploy the VA, use the web interface. Use Google if you’re looking for that boring stuff 🙂 Here we go!
Does anyone actually find NetApp OnCommand System Commander to be fast enough for normal operation? I’ll admit, I still create a good amount of Volumes and LUNs using it, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the performance category. If you follow my blog at all, you know that I’m in the middle of a migration from a non-ha exchange environment to a DAG. Being the sensible admin that I am, I have multiple copies of my Exchange databases on different storage arrays, controlled by different NetApp filers. Using System Manager to monitor the space usage of the Volumes hosting my mailbox databases is way to slow for my comfort.
I have been writing a script that will gather a bunch of information from servers, and returns an object with the information. Part of what I’m gathering is the servers that are set to auto start, and have their corresponding service stopped.
While you can get a list of services that meet part of this criteria like this:
I encountered a challenge today that was fun to fix. There’s an Organizational Unit in my AD setup that has historically been used to store disabled AD objects instead of deleting them.
When an employee leaves the organization, our standard procedure is as followed:
Disable User Object
Move to separate OU (IE AD://internal.msd/disabled/users)
Update Description field with something like: Disabled by [username] on [date]
Retain user object for x amount of days, then tombstone it.
In a new installation of vCenter 5.1, when trying to access the vSphere Web Client for the first time, you will encounter the following message:
[text] In order for this direct link to work, you must first log in to the vSphere Web Client at least once from https://{webclient -host}:{webclient-https-port}. [/text]
You can resolve this error and fix the issue using the following steps: