Other

Anything that doesn't fit in a category!

MFA - Why should I use it?

Katy Nicholson, 21 May, 2022

Surely by now everyone has turned on Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) as part of their identity protection strategy. Not necessarily - I regularly come across people who have not enabled this crucial feature, usually through the company/institution's management thinking it is not necessary or not worth the hassle. Usually this is followed up with a compromised account sending thousands of emails in an attempt to gather credentials from contacts of the compromised user. I've previously written about Azure Conditional Access and MFA, this post is a more general look at MFA and also covers some of the new Azure MFA features.

Moving the Blog to Azure App Service

Katy Nicholson, 27 February, 2022

I recently moved this blog from WordPress to its current form - a custom PHP site running on Azure App Service. At the back end I decided to store the blog posts as Markdown, as it's relatively easy to edit in any text editor, and I did not want to re-create a rich editor like WordPress has. I also wanted the site to be easy to deploy, if I need to move it or scale up multiple servers, so I decided it should be a (private, for now) GitHub repository. I've already created a template site which is used with my Redirect Tool and Certificate Expiry Tool projects, so it would make sense to extend this.

Microsoft Certification Exams

Katy Nicholson, 29 January, 2022

Certifications are an essential way of proving your abilities and there are plenty of Microsoft certifications to aim for. In this post I will be talking through what resources are available, the method I use when studying for a certification exam, and also what the exam process is like.

FTTC VDSL on a Cisco 897VA

Katy Nicholson, 9 December, 2020

I've recently changed broadband to Fibre-to-the-cab (FTTC) VDSL connection. As I have a small data cab in the house I wanted a rack mount router instead of the ISP provided one, and I had a spare Cisco 897VA hanging around which is perfect for the job. Unfortunately there isn't a web based config on this router so I've had to configure via terminal/SSH but it's not too difficult to get running on your VDSL connection.

Automated shutdown of devices

Katy Nicholson, 11 August, 2020

In a drive to reduce power usage, I've tried a few times over the years at a way to shutdown computers but not if they are in use. I've tried using scheduled tasks set to only run when idle - in reality this doesn't really work as we tend to have quite a lot of mice that move ever so slightly on their own, so the PCs never think they are idle. Even wrote a client/server application where the client reports when someone logs on, logs off, or switches user and when prompted to shutdown by the server, the client asks the logged on user if they want to go a head or cancel. This worked fine for a while but when we updated to Windows 10 it stopped working and needed a lot of time spent on working out what had changed. So I moved away from that method. My current method is two scheduled tasks. It'd be easy to just do a scheduled task that shuts down the computer, but what if somebody is working on it? Equally we could do a script which only shuts down if there are no active sessions, running if the computer has been idle for 10 minutes - but does a locked (but not switch user) screen count as active? (Yes it does) What if the mouse moves itself? With just this method a lot of PCs were never shutting down.

Hive Active Heating and a "proper" network

Katy Nicholson, 18 March, 2020

So I received a 35% off code from British Gas to get Hive Active Heating. As my boiler works off a time clock only (no thermostat) I decided this'd be great as I'd no longer have to guess how long I need to turn it on to get the temperature up on a weekend, and then forget to turn it off and have it wasting gas while I'm at work during the week. They say it has to plug directly into the router, etc etc. Well as my ISP provided router is in modem mode, this wouldn't work.. it'd either not get an IP address, or take the IP address assigned to my actual router and break the rest of the network.

Schrodinger's Network Location - Direct Access client is both inside and outside corporate network at the same time?!

Katy Nicholson, 18 March, 2020

I'm currently working from home and managed to get myself locked out of a PC (Long story involving Bitlocker). Only way out from this was to re-install Windows and then rejoin to the domain. Re-install is easy as I have WDS configured on my home network. Re-joining the domain is easy, I could either do an offline domain join with Direct Access policies embedded, or just connect the FortiGate VPN and join the domain and run gpupdate. I went with the latter as it seemed like it'd be the easier option. As I'd used WDS, the PC was now part of my home network domain, so I removed it from the domain, renamed and rebooted. I then went and connected it to the work domain and ran gpupdate, all fine, and restarted the PC. That's when it got weird.