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Campground Networking

I've travelled a couple years full time in an RV, working remotely. This can be a challenger, many campgrounds have poor Wi-Fi setups, and cell service is not always great (Do not plan on doing any work from the Grand Canyon National Park). Calling ahead and asking usually does not reveal accurate information, you are best off using campground reviews, search them for WIFI and read what people say.  The best network I have seen was at Eagles Landing RV Park in Holt, FL (Pan handle) http://eagleslandingrvpark.com/. Still not perfect. At poor sites, more than once did I offer my assistance in trying to configure and improve, but even the places which have no vendor maintain their system do not want any other hands on it. A couple of times I helped out anyway, default passwords on routers, so I upgraded their firmware, disabled 802.11b, and set a password so no-one else would mess with it. My RV network setup is not of a common type, you sort of have to be a bit of a network-guy to us

Removing Domain - Office 365 / Azure AD Tenant

Recently I had an interesting experience and challenge, removing a domain from an Azure AD (Office 365) Tenant which had been around for years, switching all the users to another domain for logins/UPN. A normal procedure for this should be simple: Change UPN for all users and groups Change any associated apps, email, and other resources Remove Domain (This can be done from Azure Portal, or from Office 365 Admin). The issue for me was that there was resources associated with some users, which I could not find what recourses or how to clear it up. In Azure Portal, Azure AD, Custom Domains - it would not let me delete at all, just showed me a link to the list of users in violation. In office 365 Admin, Settings, Domains - I was able to initiate a Delete action, once, with a supposed automatic removal action. After several hours this failed, and it now remained in a failed state that did not let me try again from UI. So I started digging with PowerShell - I found it most usable with the MS

Linux - Resizing root or other File Systems with LVM

There is a lot of information about this out there about how to do LVM (Logical Volume Manager) things, and how to do file system expands and such - and it is sometimes confusing because one page will show one thing, but not all you need, an another page may show it differently, leavings some confusion to what is possible. So here are a couple of examples on how I would do it in a couple of different scenarios Seamlessly expand partition into free space This particular procedure only works when there is free space right after the partition you are working on - then you can do these steps: Expand the virtual volume Expand the partition in the OS Expand the logical volume Expand the file system Not going to claim that this is universally fit for all scenarios - but very common for myself - and i found it perfectly safe for a root ext4 file system - i never tested on a root XFS, but i done it "live" on a secondary mounted xfs partition. I usually use Ubuntu Server,

Cisco UCS Mini - Add Extender Chassis

If you happen to own a UCS Mini Setup, a 5108 Chassis with two Fi 6324 or similar, and you are looking for documentation on how to add another 5108 Chassis with fabric extenders (2204XP in my case), then Cisco really does not have much out there, nor is there a lot of googlable information either (Everything you find is related to standalone Fabric Interconnects and "standard" UCS). Even after calling TAC, it took a while to get something, and what they told us was not even accurate. So here is how we did it, and it worked, came up without any interruption to current chassis, network, or running profiles. Equipment Of course we used our Cisco vendor to spec the equipment, but just for reference here is the list of what we had and what we added: Original Setup 5108 Chassis  Fi 6324 (Qty 2) Ports 1-2 for Fibre Channel, and 3-4 for Ethernet (MMF) Connected to a stack of switches and pair of FC switches/SAN Running UCS version 4.0.1 (Fairly recently upgraded as of M

Linux/Unix - Create a local Certificate Authority (CA)

I get these questions all the time - people know i have some runtime with certificates and such - one question is "Can't i just issue my own certs?" - and the answer of course is yes - but I always make sure to add that it won't be any use on a public web site since no-one will trust it. So setting up your own CA is not "generally useful", it is more if you need some specific things, like issuing certificates with a single signing source for client logins or similar. Most business will have a  couple of Windows Domain controllers, if you need to sign certs for a limited set of users, what you should do is make sure some system in your windows domain runs Certificate Services, then issue certs from there, make sure any non-domain-members has a trust for that CA. If you actually do need to set up you own CA, here is one way to do it Procedure to set up your own local CA The common name for the CA cert must NOT be the same as a domain name or anything e

New Lines - Windows/Unix/Linux/MacOS - viM

If you deal with scripts and other text files and move between platforms you probably discovered this "issue". Only the founding developers can explain why they chose what they did - googling about will show you a couple of different explanations - whatever the reasons, here are the differences and how to convert. The formats The Characters in use (referenced in OS info below) LF Usually referred to as LF  or Line feed Ascii code decimal 10 Hex: A or 0xA Octal: 12 or O12 Typical Escaped character in many shells and languages: \n CR Usually referred to as CR or Carriage Return Ascii code decimal 13 Hex D or 0xD Typical Escaped character in many shells and languages:  \r Unix, Linux, and Modern MacOS - The POSIX standard Each Line ends with a single character:  LF Most programming languages will understand/interpret this format properly. Simple Windows programs, like the built in Notepad will not show this properly. Windows (and DOS) Each lin

Active Directory Account Lockout - Narrowing Down the source

If you are in a all-windows shop where everything is nice and neat, everybody has a proper domain membership and all authentication is SSO or Windows Integrated, then you probably do not have much of a problem with repeated account lockouts. On the other hand, if you are in a mixed environment, lots of :Linux, Mac, and unmanaged Wintendo, then you probably run into some users that manage to Lock themselves out frequently - typically for several days in a row after the account password had been changed. Reasons can be plenty fold - typically saved credentials somewhere, like a git client, sql-server client, email client, rdp-manager, smbfs-automount, or anything that tries a bunch of logins when you start it up, or keeps trying in the background. As a sysadmin, you don't have time to narrow it down for the end user - but they will be adamant it is not their fault, so you probably need to prove that "Yes it is" - so I use powershell to grab 4740 events from Domain Con