James McDonald

Exetel IPv6

Exetel IPv6 learnings on Unifi UDM Exetel hands out a /60 by default Note: The IPv6 addresses below have been tweaked to hide the actual network prefix and host portion. Exetel by default hands out a prefix designation of /60 (see below on how to view that in the UDM...

Migrate a VM from Azure to XCP-NG

Just migrated an Azure Linux Ubuntu 22.04 VM to XCP-ng and got it running successfully Here are my rough steps: Create a snapshot of the VM in Azure (good idea to shut down the VM when you have a VM that writes data all the time) Convert the snapshot to a disk (Mine...

PHPSECLIB3 Client Algorithms

Recently our EDI supplier notified that they were changing their SFTP encryption and data integrity algorithms I use https://api.phpseclib.com/3.0/phpseclib3/Net/SFTP.html to talk to their SFTP gateway. So I to confirm the change would not cause an issue I had to...

Run 7-zip from powershell

The performance of both the Windows and Powershell Zip utilities is abysmal The following Powershell script enables a Zip operation on approximately 0.33GB of data consisting of around 59,000 files to go from minutes down to less than a minute using 7-Zip instead of...

So many Email Scams

The internet is a waterhole and we are digital gazellesJames McDonald 2024 Look at the text below of 2 emails I received sent to two of my email aliases from two different From addresses I presume it just requires you to reply to the query and then they send some...

Meraki Open Source Licenses

Until today I assumed that Meraki was built in-house with only closed source software. But having a look at the Meraki-Firmware-Licenses bundle it is clear that like Unifi Cisco is using many Open Source packages to bring together it's offering: Having only just...

VEEAM FAILS

If you have Veeam backup failing with the Updating BCD failed with Cannot update SafeBoot flag and SentinelOne is installed. Try the following from a veeam forum post 29/11/2023 2:35:29 PM :: Processing TGN-HO-DC02 Error: VSSControl: -2147467259 Backup job failed....

Certbot Reload Nginx on cert renewal

https://github.com/toggenation/cert-checker Recently I created a Cert Expiry Checker so I can be notified when my and my clients SSL certs are 27 days from expiry. What is strange is I got notified that a client on Squarespace has an SSL cert within 27 days of expiry...

LastLogon using PowerShell

Get-ADUser -Filter {Enabled -eq $true} -Properties Name,Manager,LastLogon,DistinguishedName | Select-Object Name,samAccountName,DistinguishedName,@{n='LastLogon';e={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.LastLogon).ToString('g')}} | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation -Path...

Date time showing   instead of space

CSV opened in Excel is showing   instead of a space between the DateTime and the period (am / pm) That is because it is being opened in Excel using CP-1252 instead of UTF-8 and thus rendering the NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE incorrectly...

Window XP – TimeZones – 1 Hour Out

Today I had to go old school. Problem: Windows XP time 1 hour out. The user changes it to the correct time but it keeps resetting to the wrong time. Cause: Operating System (Windows XP) is so old that it no longer gets Time Zone updates so it had the wrong Daylight...