Brian's How To

I have recently gotten into working with PowerShell Universal Dashboard. At work we have some requirements that Universal Dashboard will help accommodate. So I got to work with the community edition to be able to do a proof of concept. Everything has gone very well and we are purchasing the suite. That being said the biggest issue I ran into was being able to update the page with results by pushing a button.

Recently I was writing a script to create Azure Route Tables and I kept having issue with getting virtual network gateway route propagation to be enabled.

In a perfect world no one would ever store usernames and passwords in code.  We are on in a perfect world and I myself make mistakes and in the past I have created scripts that required passwords in them and I accidentally pushed the code to VSTS with the password entered.  So I had to figure out how to remove that from the history of the file.  I could have deleted the project and created a new one but I would have lost all my history of commits which I did not want to do.  Here is how I found to remove text from commit history.

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I have been doing a ton of PowerShell scripts lately and I was wanting to find a way to tie into a version control system.  Originally I wanted to do something like GitHub but since I want to do a free option GitHub was out as everything is public on their free option.  So I looked at Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).  They offer 5 users for free and the repositories can be setup as either git or TFS.  So VSTS was it.

My next challenge was PowerShell ISE.  I was wanting to interrelate VSTS into ISE but I did not find a solution that I liked but I did stuble across Visual Studio Code.  VS Code is pretty neat.  It has a ton of addons and can support many languages including PowerShell.  Also there is an addon for VSTS which is nice.

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I have been wanting to setup Snort on a CentOS based firewall for a while and I finally got around to it.  The good thing is I finally got it working thanks to a blog Dennis Panagiotopoulos here, I have confirmed this works for CentOS 6.6 and 7.1.  The problem is as with getting Snort to run inline.  I was unable to find any thing on getting this to work correctly.  So here is what I had to do in addition to Dennis’s blog post:

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I recently upgraded one of my laptops to Windows 8 and I noticed that it could run Hyper-V, so I enabled the Hyper-V feature and everything went smooth until I setup the Virtual Switch.  I set it up to use my wireless NIC and I left the check mark for “Allow management operating system to share this network adapter”.  Once it was done setting up the Network Bridge and the vEthernet interface I could no longer access the network.   Read more �

When deploying Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange and enabling file filter the majority if not all emails being sent and received had the body of the message replaced with:

FILE QUARANTINED

Microsoft Forefront Protection for Exchange Server removed a file since it was found to match a filter.
File name: “winmail.dat”
Filter name: “FILE FILTER= Blocked File Extensions: *” Read more �

I was tired of having all these invalid or untrusted certs on my network applications and devices so I decided to load up a CentOS box with OpenSSL and make my own Certificate Authority (CA).  See the steps after the jump. Read more �

I wanted to write a quick post about an issue that I ran into but could not find much information on.  When running SQL 2008 R2 Management Studio on Windows 7 x64 ( I have not tried on 32 bit) there are a couple of catches.

• First one I ran into is the user must run the Management Studio as an administrator if they are in an active directory group that has been given access to a database because if Management Studio is not run as administrator then for some reason the users group information is not passed to the SQL server.

• Second is when connecting to a SQL 2005 server the user is not able to update or delete tables in a database.  Creating a new table was not an issue it was just when modifying, updating or deleting an entry in a table or the entire table its self.  The user was set to owner of the database and was not apart of any group.

The first issue is a pretty easy fix but I have not found a fix for the 2nd issue.