Hospitable IT

This weekend I have been messing about with automating the installation and configuration of ESXi for an upcoming project. I got stuck on a particular aspect of this so through it was worth posting about.

I was using Remmina on a Raspberry Pi as an RDP client to access a Windows RDS Server and display status screens from various monitoring applications. I already had Remmina configured to auto start, I just needed to delay it by about 60 seconds.

I have recently had the opportunity to get my hands on a shiny new Cisco DNA Center appliance and some sexy new Catalyst 9K switches. One of the first items on my to-do list was to configure an existing ISE server as an external authentication source using TACACS.

This is a quick post on how I handled the Captive Network Assistant for a site that was hosting a walled garden WiFi network and wished to redirect clients to a media service portal splash page.

Today I got stuck for while when upgrading an on premise installation of the Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Server from 7.3 to the latest version 8.0.1.1 so I though it was worth posting about.

A site I work with uses the Cisco Voice/Collaboration platform and doesn’t have a good mechanism for monitoring it. They use PRTG so this was a great opportunity for me to build upon my rather basic PowerShell scripting skills and create a useful PRTG sensor.

I was having a lot of problems today moving the SFTP backup target for a Cisco Unified CCX system. To cut a long story short (and it took a bloody long time to work this out!), the problem was with the ciphers that were being made available by the SSHD service on the new backup target.

I recently experienced some issues at a site with DFS, there was a suspicion that DFS replication was periodically flooding the WAN network links. I cobbled together this script to assist in tuning the network throttling but haven’t actually implemented it as a PRTG sensor yet.

Today I had to setup wireless access for a group of PCs that were to be used in a training room where wired access was limited. To solve this problem I implemented an alternate login method for the existing wireless network that used the AD computer account to authenticate using Protected EAP-MSCHAPv2. This way the PCs connected to the wireless network before anyone logged in.

In the third post of this series, we configure our Graylog server to use Active Directory as an external authentication source