Byte sized for when a nibble just isn't enough!
Firmware-embedded activation keys have become the standard method for OEM providers to deliver license keys on devices. Gone are the days of a Microsoft label stuck on the device with a license code that may come off or degrade over time. We now have a product key stored in the device firmware which allows it … Read more
I have a Synology NAS at home which is used for both my home lab and general NAS purposes (file shares, Plex, etc). I recently setup the ‘Active Backup For Business’ (ABfB) package on my Synology as I wanted to try out the backup function for my VMware lab. Excitingly for me the ABfB package … Read more
If like me you have Kali Linux installations you may have come across a slight problem recently whereby the public key had expired resulting in an error when attempting to update. You likely received something similar to the example below when attempting an apt update – root@kali:/# apt update Hit:1 https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo debian-stretch InRelease Get:2 http://ftp.hands.com/kali … Read more
People who work with me or have done in the past will know I’m really keen on ensuring TLS/SSL settings and certificates are properly implemented wherever possible. In this post I’m going to cover some of the nice features in Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) latest iLO. If you’re not familiar, HPE provide IPMI functionality via … Read more
I often find myself needing to leverage the incredibly useful tool Nmap which is used for network/port scanning and so much more. Usually I will find a server that I can justify installing it on and just leave it there for when required or build and leave a virtual machine running Kali Linux. I figured it … Read more
I recently made an addition to my setup in the form of a Synology DS716+ii NAS – I’ll probably write some more posts about it in the near future but for now I want to cover how I replaced the default SSL/TLS certificate it uses with one issued by my pfSense system. My home computer … Read more
If you have ever replaced VMware vCenter server certificates you will know that there are default values for common SSL/TLS certificate attributes, for example country code and organisation name. By default VMware have their own details for these attributes as shown below – Country – US E-mail – [email protected] Locality – Palo Alto Organisational Unit … Read more
I finally got round to creating my colleagues and I an account on Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). If you haven’t looked into it then basically it is the cloud version of Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) which is typically run within your own environment and managed internally. We have been looking to move … Read more
I configured my site for HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) a while back and being satisfied it was all running OK I figured it was about time I configure my site to be preloaded in popular browsers. When I went to the hstspreload.org website to submit my site I received an interesting message – Unnecessary HSTS header over … Read more
A quick post to cover a nice feature which people may not be aware of – the ability to pipe output from the Windows command line directly into the clipboard. It’s as simple as it sounds, we use the normal pipe function and then use the clip keyword. As an example let us run the … Read more