I am going to preface this article with a brief explanation of why I am sold on one Microsoft product – Microsoft Security Essentials(MSE) or Windows Defender. I say one because these products are essentially the same thing. I can tell you that I have used nearly every anti-virus product under the sun, but I… Read More
Recently after installing a fresh new copy of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I found that root ssh access was set to without-password by default now. What that means to you is that if you are trying to ssh to your server with your root account and password, you will receive an access denied error. In order… Read More
Recently I ran into an issue with upgrading a Dell PowerEdge 4400 BIOS. This specific server is currently running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and I needed an easy way to update the bios while in Ubuntu or Debian. The official option from Dell consist of a windows based bios update tool. Obviously that is not going… Read More
FreeDOS is a free DOS-compatible operating system that can be used to play games, run legacy software, or support embedded systems. FreeDOS is basically like the old MS-DOS, but better! For example, FreeDOS lets you access FAT32 file systems and use large disk support (LBA) — a feature not available in MS-DOS, and only included… Read More
As of late, I have had several clients receiving Hewlett Packard Critical Advisory’s concerning a manufacturing defect with certain hard drives. This specific advisory states that the customer must run an ADU Disk Report in order determine whether or not their drives are affected. With that said, most if not all of my clients are… Read More
Previously I wrote and article detailing how to Monitor HP RAID Array on Debian, unfortunately since that writing I have found a fatal flaw in it’s methodology. While our automated monitoring system using cciss-vol-status will in fact report a failed drive/array, it’s flaw lies in not reporting a predictive drive failure. The hpacucli tool is… Read More
As of late it seems as if everyone is jumping on the MariaDB Database bandwagon. In this article I will provide a bash automation script as well as detail it’s usage in order to ease the MySQL Server to MariaDB Server migration. The script is broken down into four stages. Below I will break down… Read More
If you’ve ever looked into high-availability, you are well aware that there are probably one hundred different solutions. In this article we will show you our no nonsense solution using software called UCARP. Using this simpler approach you will have a pair of hosts each of which is prepared to take over a single Virtual… Read More
Time and time again I have clients requesting that OpenVPN GUI connect automatically when they login to their windows machine. Although there is no built in solution using OpenVPN GUI, it can be done. Below we will detail the three step process that will be required to enable OpenVPN Auto Connect. The first step is… Read More
I recently ran into a situation where a customer of mine had purchased a new HP Proliant server with a Windows Server 2008 R2 ROK license (Reseller Option Kit). This specific customer is using the Proliant as part of their virtual infrastructure, so naturally the server has VMware ESXi Server installed on it. The issues… Read More