The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Power User’ Category

openSUSE – Review of the week 2018/03 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*) – be sure to review your openssh config!

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/20

Before upgrading Tumbleweed this week, you need to review your openssh config.

This is not mentioned in Review of the week 2018/03 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*), but very important.

So be sure to read these before upgrading:

If you forget to review /etc/ssh/sshd_config, you get this in journalctl if you have specified your own MACs for instance when hardening according to [WayBack including rimemd160] Secure Secure Shell:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, SSH, TCP | Leave a Comment »

Installing A Maccon Card In A Macintosh Se/30 – Asante MacCon Family Ethernet Network Cards For The Macintosh Installation Manual [Page 29]

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/19

To get started:

Pictures, binary driver image from Index of /pdf/apple/nubus/asante/MacCon_SE30

Index of /pdf/apple/nubus/asante/MacCon_SE30

[ICO] Name Last modified Size Description

[PARENTDIR] Parent Directory
[   ] 5000118-00-01.BIN 2018-01-11 10:16 16K
[IMG] Asante_MacCon_SE30_1.JPG 2018-01-10 14:24 545K
[IMG] Asante_MacCon_SE30_2.JPG 2018-01-10 14:24 418K
[IMG] Asante_MacCon_SE30_3.JPG 2018-01-11 10:17 573K
[IMG] Asante_MacCon_SE30_4.JPG 2018-01-11 10:17 543K
[IMG] Asante_MacCon_SE30_5.JPG 2018-01-11 10:17 439K
[IMG] Farallon_SI_A_Series_b.JPG 2018-01-11 10:17 438K
[IMG] Farallon_SI_A_Series_f.JPG 2018-01-11 10:17 637K

Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at bitsavers.trailing-edge.com Port 80

 

–jeroen

Posted in Apple, Classic Macintosh, History, Macintosh SE/30, Power User | Leave a Comment »

mtr does ping and traceroute in one go – bold/red lines are for non-responding hosts

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/19

I learned about mtr via [WayBackBufferbloat Demystified – Andrew Clunis which I found via  [WayBack] Älterer Artikel, der Bufferbload und https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel erklärt. – Kristian Köhntopp – Google+

mtr is cool:

mtr combines the functionality of the ‘traceroute’ and ‘ping’ programs in a single network diagnostic tool.

Running it, I saw occasional bold lines that were not mentioned in the README, but after a search in the repo I found it to be in documented NEWS:

Draw names in red (GTK) or bold (Curses) if host doesn’t respond.

Some times from here across to California back when I still had ADSL:

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Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Microsoft guided walk through to Fix Windows Update errors

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/19

This one helped me to fix a 0x80243004 error: somehow the virtual network adapter didn’t work well and a reboot worked.

Use our guided walk through to help you resolve Windows Update issues using the error code you got while updating your version of Windows.

Source: Fix Windows Update errors

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7 | Leave a Comment »

Backreaction: Pure Nerd Fun: The Grasshopper Problem

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/18

For the love of math and physics science [WayBackBackreaction: Pure Nerd Fun: The Grasshopper Problem.

Background material and videos:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User, science | Leave a Comment »

Using hardware security tokens cross-platform is only slightly more complicat…

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/17

Thanks for the excellent comment explaining how to use hardware tokens as a comment to [WayBack] Using hardware security tokens cross-platform is only slightly more complicated than piloting a Space Shuttle. ##sarcasm – Jan Wildeboer – Google+

Jan Wildeboer:

+Jeroen Wiert Pluimers OK. Let’s look a bit at how this works. There are several competing standards/ways to use a security token. Typically you’ll decide between the two most used ones. As a CCID device AKA SmartCard with OpenSC or using gpg-agent. And that’s an either/or question. Some of the security tokens can only work with gpg-agent, some can do both (but not at the same time) and some are only useful as CCID style (e.g. the Nitrokey HSM).

OK. So now we look at platforms. CCID using OpenSC mostly works everywhere, but you might need to install some additional software depending on your OS. Older versions of MacOS X were notoriously bad, since (High) Sierra it has become better.

On Linux it again really depends. The gnome-keyring-agent that is active in a Gnome session really messes everything up, so better deactivate that. Which is not really trivial. But you have to have a socket for ssh-agent to pick up the key, so some stuff goes to your .bash.rc and you have to make some changes to Gnome config.

If you want to use a Yubikey for 2FA, note that it cannot do TOTP (Time based One Time Password) which Amazon wants for AWS auth. So you need another helper app on your computer.

Here’s some articles that explain it in detail:

The middle two links are actually part of the series [WayBack] Yubikey All The Things | EngineerBetter | More than Cloud Foundry specialists which has a third post [WayBack] Yubikeys for Static Secrets | EngineerBetter | More than Cloud Foundry specialists

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Communications Development, Development, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, SSH, TCP | Leave a Comment »

Provisioning Windows 7 test VMs with know users/passwords

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/16

The proxmox side

In Proxmox, ensure you have a named backup of your machine that starts with vzdump-qemu like this:

vzdump-qemu-Win7Sp1UK.vma.lzo

That way, Proxmox knows that it can restore from it.

Don’t forget to assign a new MAC address to the network adapter so it’s unique on the network.

The Windows side

I wanted to provision this with two test accounts: one regular and one with administrator access.

The latter needs to be added to the Administrators group using [WayBacknet localgroup.

Both need passwords that (for now) never expire. This is where [WayBacknet user add fails: even if you set the correct flag, it won’t be reflected, so you need WMIC UserAccount for that.

These two posts helped me a lot with the below batch file fragment:

After restoring, run a batch file like this with an UAC token:

  call :addUser regularTestUser regularTestPassword
  net localgroup "Remote Desktop Users" "regularTestUser" /add
  call :addUser administratorTestUser administratorTestPassword
  :: https://superuser.com/questions/515175/create-admin-user-from-command-line
  net localgroup administrators administratorTestUser /add
  goto :eof
:addUser
  :: https://superuser.com/questions/515175/create-admin-user-from-command-line
  net user /expires:never /add %1 %2 /expires:never
  :: https://serverfault.com/questions/710964/accounts-suddenly-expiring-when-created-with-net-user-add-expiresnever
  WMIC UserAccount where "Name='%1'" set PasswordExpires=FALSE
  goto :eof

The Remote Desktop Users tip is from [WayBackEnable remote desktop from command line (CMD) but that post has “beautified” double quotes in them, so net localgroup by default complains it cannot find the group. The code above should have regular quotes.

Finally the computer needs a new name. Again WMIC to the rescue here as Windows 7 only comes with PowerShell 2.0 which cannot rename a computer.

Again with a UAC token, execute something like this:

WMIC ComputerSystem where Name="%COMPUTERNAME%" call Rename Name=INNOSETUPTEST
%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -r

This last tip was via [WayBackwindows 7 – Renaming computers via command prompt – Super User.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Proxmox, Virtualization, Windows, Windows 7 | Leave a Comment »

Potential wifi drop problem caused by Google devices – Google Product Forums

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/15

Sometimes the same problem here on an Asus RT-N66U: Potential wifi drop problem caused by Google devices – Google Product Forums [Archive.is].

Related:

Via [WayBack] Google Cast-apparaten veroorzaken wifi-drop-outs bij verschillende routers – Computer – Nieuws – Tweakers

–jeroen

 

Posted in Power User, WiFi | Leave a Comment »

Best SSDs: Holiday 2017

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/15

Not just a great overview for the season, but also a good overview on what the state of the art in various SSD products is: [WayBackBest SSDs: Holiday 2017.

Recommended reading when you are looking for SSDs

–jeroen

Posted in Hardware, Power User, SSD | Leave a Comment »

Intel Sightings in ESXi Bundled Microcode Patches for VMSA-2018-0004 (52345)

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/01/15

If you’ve installed this patch [WayBack] Intel Sightings in ESXi Bundled Microcode Patches for VMSA-2018-0004 (52345), then please read the article if your processor is affected by microcode updates in it.

To inspect which processor is in your machine, please see:

On my system, this was enough:

vim-cmd hostsvc/hostsummary | grep cpuModel
vim-cmd hostsvc/hosthardware | grep -w -A7 "cpuPkg\|cpuFeature" | grep "description\|eax\|ebx\|ecx\|edx\|vendor"

The above statements are based on:

I was lucky, but for now, ESXi has retracted it.

So please disregard my previous post VMware ESXi 6.5.0 Patch History.

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, ESXi6.5, Power User, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »