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Gary Williams

Gary Williams

IT Person | Veeam Vanguard | VMware vExpert | Windows admin | Docker fan | Spiceworks moderator | keeper of 3 cats | Avid Tea fan

Maidstone •
224 posts •
BCP

BCP and extreme weather events

In this blog I discuss extreme weather events especially the current heatwave and why people exercising precautions are sensible, not snowflakes.

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iDrac firmware introduces a security check that could trip you up

A couple weeks ago, I had a dell server completely lock up on me, including the iDRAC which meant a 90 minute trip in to the datacentre to give the server a kick.

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Disaster Recovery

CDN's - the new internet based single point of failure?

Fastly had a global CDN outage. With it went a large chunk of the internet. Why did this happen and why aren't companies including upstream providers in their DR and BCP plans?

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vcentre

Restoring VCentre from a file based backup

Restoring VCentre from a VCentre backup due to cat induced corruption..... Yup, that's a thing that happened!

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Security

Solarwinds password issue - the intern did it.

Solarwinds have decided that an intern was to blame for a bad 'backdoor' style password being used in their code. Here I explain why this simple statement shows that solarwinds have a lot of issues that need to be dealt with before I'll trust them again.

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Security

Microsoft have a big problem with their patching and QA processes

Microsoft have admitted to a bug in a recent patch release but their documentation, download site and "fix" for the issue is a woeful mess.

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vcentre

Finding and fixing a broken cert for VCentre

I recently needed to add a cert to a vcentre 7.0 enviroment to allow Skyline and this is normally a striaght forward process. Certainly, 7.0 is many times easier than previous

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Disaster Recovery

The difference between DR and BCP

The differences between BCP and DR and very important to understand as each has an impact on a businesses ability to be able to run. Here I break down the key differences between the two.

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vcentre

Recovering a corrupt 6.7 VCentre after a storage outage

A power outage on my NAS corrupted VCentre, this is how I recovered it.

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Security

Windows DNS flaw is serious - patch now.

Hopefully, you have probably all heard of the "Sigred" vulnerbility in DNS, a security issue which has existed in DNS servers for 17 years. That means that if you run a

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CentOS

Exploring CentOS 8

In this blog I take my first steps into CentOS 8 exploring the version of OpenSSL and Apache as well as taking a quick look at the supported TLS versions and cockpit.

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handy apps

Handy Apps - Windows terminal

Exploring the windows terminal and how much better than the cmd prompt it is.

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vpn

The problem with VPN's

A review of some issues seen on our corporate VPN in light of covid-19 and remote working.

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BCP

BCP and Covid-19

A few thoughts on how business need to be aware of things that threaten the day to day running of the company including threats like Covid-19

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Security

LDAPS on Windows Servers

As some are probably aware, Microsoft were planning on releasing a patch in March 2020 that will make some changes to LDAP. Since that announcecment MS have admitted that they have had a

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Administrivia

A little reflection on 2019 and onward, to 2020!

A little reflection on 2019 and onward, to 2020!

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NAS

SMB3, NAS aliases and cross domain auth

A look at authenticating to a NAS device over SMB2 and 3 using alias names.

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Vmware

ESXi capacity reports

A couple months ago I had a need to generate a quick report on the status of ESXi, the reported needed to include CPU usage, RAM and a few other things and while

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Windows 10

Handy Apps - Windows Terminal and the SSH Client

Exploring the Windows terminal preview and the OpenSSH Client

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Veeam

Veeam Vanguard Summit 2019 – Backup and Replication v10 - file share backups

Exploring Veeam Version 10 and its ability to perform backups of NAS shares.

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HTTPS

Google Chrome to deprecate TLS 1.0/1.1

Chrome plan to deprecate TLS 1.0 and 1.1 - this is what it means for you and here is how to test what version of TLS your website uses.

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Docker

Deploying Cachet - a status page clone

Deploying cachet using docker-compose and adding in HTTPS certs for a complete, secure status page clone

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Azure

Creating a site to site VPN to Azure using Azure tools

This article shows how to create a site to site VPN from on prem to Azure.

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Handy Apps - RVTools

RVTools seems to have fallen by the wayside in recent years, which is a huge shame, as it is still an amazing product that deserves more attention that it currently gets. I still

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Are CafePress ignoring a data breach?

I am a huge fan of Have I been pwned and signed up for breach notifications some years back. Yesterday, I got an email saying that my details were included in a breach

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