Welcome to Brian’s How To.
I write about PowerShell, Azure, AWS, Windows, Linux, and infrastructure automation.
Posts
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RDCMan Change Passwords with PowerShell
I have been using different RDP managers over the years and the last one I was using was Terminals. but the project has not been supported since 2019 and so security issues that come up will never be fixed. I recently moved to a different laptop and decided it was time to look for a different RDP manager. I landed on RDCMan from Sysinternals.
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PowerShell Universal Dashboard – Update Page On Button Click
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.
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PowerShell – Create Azure Route Table with Virtual network gateway route propagation
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.
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Remove Passwords or Other Text from VSTS Git
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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Enable Secure PowerShell Remoting
Working with a lot of VMs in Azure it has be come more essential to be able to run my scripts on many VMs at a time. The first step in doing this is to enable remote PowerShell and keep it secure. Below is the script that I use to enable remote PowerShell and generate a cert to use for encrypting the communication.
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Visual Studio Code with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)
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.
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Snort Inline on CentOS
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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Hyper-V on Windows 8 – Wireless Network Does Not Work
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. I did some looking and I was not getting an IP address for the vEthernet interface (which I should have been). After playing with it for a bit I found that if I disabled the vEthernet interface and then enabled it everything worked. Then after a reboot it would not work again until I disabled and enabled the interface. My long term solution to this was to create a PowerShell script to disable the interface then enable it. I then created a scheduled task to run the script at startup, which has worked well.
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Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Blocking winmail.dat
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:
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Create a CA
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.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). Here is how I did it.
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SQL 2008 R2 on Windows 7
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.
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Site Update
I have finally decided to update WordPress for this site on my server and get everything going again. Of course the template I was using doesn’t work on the new version of WordPress so I have spent the past couple of days looking at different templates but I have been having a hard time finding a good one. I landed on this one because it is simple and it has what I need. Let me know what you think of the new layout.
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OpenFiler as Fiber Channel Target
I wanted to post my findings on how to use OpenFiler as a Fiber Channel SAN. This process isn’t documented as well as I hoped it would have been but the forums on OpenFiler helped a lot but still were lacking. This post will go from blank box to Fiber Channel LUN being presented by OpenFiler. My goal was for a faster SAN as I was using iSCSI but it just didn’t meet my expectations. For the SAN I am using a Qlogic QLA-2342 fiber card and a Brocade Silkworm 3200 fiber switch.
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HyperTerminal in Windows 7
I have talked to a lot of professionals and one of the big complaints about Windows 7 is the lack of HyperTerminal. So here is how to get HyperTerminal on to Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit).
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XenServer - Change Bonding Mode
By default XenServer 5.5 uses source-based ARP load balancing (balance-slb or mode 7) for bonding. If this is needed to be changed to a different mode all that is needed to do is edit the file /opt/xensource/libexec/interface-reconfigure on line 863. Do this using the following command:
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Setup NFS Server
This is based on CentOS but should be very similar for other distros as well.
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SSH Without a Password
On the client generate a new rsa ssh key.
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DD for Backups
I wanted a way to create a backup of my whole hard drive or just a partition of the drive. In windows I use Ghost or Acronis but for Linux I wanted something free and easy to use. DD is build into Linux and works great. I like that it is possible to compress the image with gzip. Here is how to do backups with DD.
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My First Post
I am Brian McCammon. I have been doing a lot of work with computers as it is my job and hobby. I have in the pas year or so started in on Linux. I have learned a lot in that time and thought that it would be nice to have a single place that I could go and find a lot of how tos for things.
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