As we’ve made progress on open-source PowerShell, it’s time to start talking more in-depth about:
- different editions of PowerShell
- PowerShell’s relationship to .NET Core and .NET Standard
- the future of PowerShell
- when you might expect to start taking a dependency on PowerShell Core 6.0 in production
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in the number of high CPU/High Memory usage problems with WSUS, including WSUS in a System Center Configuration Manager environment – these have mostly corresponded with Update Tuesdays.
Source : motor1
In IIS 10.0, we introduced the IISAdministration PowerShell module which was a new way to manage IIS. This module included numerous improvements over the existing WebAdministration cmdlets.
Unfortunately, folks who hadn’t updated to Windows Server 2016 weren’t able to take advantage of the new management cmdlets until now. I’m pleased to announce that we’ve now released this module to the PowerShell Gallery and is available for use on Windows Server 2012 and above.
If you still rely on PowerShell 2.0, you should think about updating your code to work with PowerShell 5.0. Starting in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, Microsoft will no longer support PowerShell 2.0. In this Ask the Admin, I’ll discuss why PowerShell 2.0 poses a security risk and how to remove it from Windows 10.
In the wake of Adobe’s announcement about the end of life of Flash, Microsoft this week announced its own schedule for removing Flash from its own products.
If you notice that your WordPress hosting provider is not running PHP 7, but has it available to its users, you may want to consider making a WordPress PHP version change so you can benefit from all of PHP 7’s features. However, in order to avoid breaking your site, you should make sure all of your site’s themes and plugins are compatible.
To check for WordPress PHP version compatibility, you can use another simple plugin called PHP Compatibility Checker.
The WordPress core uses .htaccess for two things: Permalinks and Multisite. This means that .htaccess is only required if you have enabled either of these features. Otherwise, .htaccess is entirely optional for default WordPress installations. Beyond the WP core, many plugins also use the .htaccess file for custom directives involving rewrites, redirects, custom headers, file compression, and much more. In many cases, such plugins add their .htaccess rules to your .htaccess file automatically, behind the scenes.
So even if you haven’t enabled Permalinks or Multisite, your site may be using .htaccess rules added by WordPress plugins for various types of functionality. That’s one of the cool things about .htaccess: it can be configured and customized to improve your site’s performance, security, and usability. To help you get started, this tutorial provides a collection of .htaccess techniques that are useful for any WordPress-powered site. Combined into a blank .htaccess file, these techniques serve as a great starting point for creating your own custom .htaccess file for WordPress.
Let’s say that you have a GPO that is scoped to a specific security group. If you add a computer to this security group, you would normally need to restart in order for the computer to see that it is now a member of this group. To bypass this, you can delete the system’s Kerberos ticket and run GPUpdate. The computer will magically see its new group membership without a restart.
Hello Everyone, my name is Moni and I am a Support Engineer in the Windows Devices and Deployment team here at Microsoft. In this post, I’ll be discussing an issue where the Server Cleanup Wizard for WSUS 3.0 Service Pack 2 times out when attempting to delete computers that have not contacted the server in 30 days or more....
Details of the error are as follows:
The WSUS administration console was unable to connect to the WSUS Server Database.Verify that SQL server is running on the WSUS Server. If the problem persists, try restarting SQL.System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException — Access to table dbo.tbDownstreamServerClientSummaryRollup is blocked because the signature is not valid.Source.Net SqlClient Data ProviderStack Trace:at System.Windows.Forms.Control.MarshaledInvoke(Control caller, Delegate method, Object[] args, Boolean synchronous)at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method, Object[] args)at Microsoft.UpdateServices.UI.SnapIn.Wizards.ServerCleanup.ServerCleanupWizard.OnCleanupComplete(Object sender, PerformCleanupCompletedEventArgs e)
When Active Directory replication breaks, IT is in trouble. PowerShell comes with a few cmdlets that allow you to test if Active Directory replication is working properly.
Just Enough Administration (JEA) is a new extension in the Windows Management Framework that allows you to restrict the rights of IT admins in remote PowerShell sessions. In this first part of my JEA series, I will give an overview of the basic concepts.
Occasionally you may find that you want to start over in WSUS with a fresh database (SUSDB). There can be any number of reasons for this, but typically I see people doing this if their SUSDB is rather old, has a ton of unneeded updates in it, and maintenance has not been done on the SUSDB in years. In those cases you can find that a rebuild may be faster and easier than fixing the problematic SUSDB. Typically speaking, I see people wanting to recreate the just the content dir if they accidentally unchecked the “download update files to this server only when updates are approved” and ended up with a hard drive full of unneeded files. Whatever the reason, here are the steps for recreating the SUSDB and the WSUS Content folder for a Windows Server 2012 based WSUS computer
In this article, I'll show you how to create a tool in PowerShell that will allow you to update multiple SQL servers in one swath with a single command.
The ProblemSource : IEInternals
From time to time, various users have complained to the IE team that they’re unable to log into assorted websites and services that they care about: Hotmail and GMail are two common examples. They report that after entering their credentials into the login page, the page seems to get caught in some sort of redirect loop, redirecting from the login page to the site back to the login page. This pattern either continues endlessly or until an error message is displayed.
The Security Compliance Manager (SCM) is a free tool from Microsoft that enables you to quickly configure, and manage the computers in your environment using Group Policy and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. This version of SCM supports Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016.
LGPO.exe is a command-line utility to automate the management of local group policy objects (LGPO). Version 1.0 was released last January. The PRE-RELEASE LGPO.exe v2.0 is attached to this blog post, and adds support for Multiple Local Group Policy Objects (MLGPO) and 64-bit REG_QWORD registry values. It also adds support for /e mnemonic options to enable the GP client side extensions for LAPS, Credential Guard, and Device Guard.
As you may have seen, there has been an update to the extended support lifecycle for WSUS 3.0 SP2 (WSUS 3.2). We received feedback that ending this product’s life in July 2017 would cause a significant disruption for those Windows Server 2008/R2 deployments that planned to rely upon it until January 2020. As such, the end of life for this product is now January 2020.
Storage Replica is a new feature in Windows Server 2016 that allows us to do storage-agnostic block-level replication of data.
Hi all,
I’m Jeff Patterson, Program Manager for Work Folders and Offline Files.
Jane wrote a blog last year which covers how to use Folder Redirection with Work Folders. The blog is great for new environments. If Folder Redirection and Offline Files are currently used, there are some additional steps that need to be performed which are covered in this migration guide.
VSCode is the primary way to edit and debug PowerShell scripts on Mac OS and Linux. If you do not have it yet, follow these instructions on GitHub on installing VSCode on Mac OS/Linux/Windows and adding its PowerShell extension.
As you have probably heard by now, Microsoft has just open-sourced PowerShell and made it available for Linux and Mac OS X. In this blog post, I will take you through the steps to download, install and run PowerShell on a Mac.
As you can see this announcement is huge – not only you can freely read and change the code of the PowerShell itself, you can build it and run it almost anywhere.
The Connect app in Windows 10 Anniversary Update gives smartphone users the ability to “cast” their screens to a PC or laptop running Microsoft’s latest version of its ever-evolving operating system. Let’s call this feature the “poor-man’s Continuum.” But, more importantly, it gives Android users something that has been solely constrained to Windows devices – the ability to mirror smartphone and tablet screens to Windows 10. Notably, this feature doesn’t work for iOS and the host device must support Miracast.
Advanced search in search engines, enables analysis provided to exploit GET / POST capturing emails & urls, with an internal custom validation junction for each target / url found
Although Microsoft provides Windows Defender as an integrated part of Windows 10 they do not mandate that as your only option.
Once you install your favorite third party anti-virus/malware solution Windows Defender gets out of the way and is turned off so it does not cause any conflicts with your scanning/protection software of choice.
In the recently released Windows 10 Anniversary Update there is a new option for those of you using third party security software that allows you to take advantage of the years worth of research Microsoft has invested into protecting systems from viruses and malware.
So as many of you may know, yesterday Microsoft released a security hotfix that changed the behavior of Group Policy. Put simply if you have a security group filtered User Group Policy Object and you also removed the “Authenticated Users” group from the policy it will no longer apply after you install MS16-072.
Today, I will introduce to my favorite PowerShell ISE add-ons: Script Browser, Module Browser, and ISE Geek. At the end of the post, I'll leave you with a hand-selected list of some other ISE add-ins.
To build fast sites, developers need powerful tools to analyze the performance of their sites and debug issues. In-browser tools like the F12 Developer Tools are a great start and the primary tools for analyzing what’s happening behind the scenes when a page slows down. However, some scenarios require measuring performance characteristics in the context of other applications and the operating system itself. For these scenarios, we use the Windows Performance Toolkit.
IIS is a mature technology with a large amount of configuration available. Historically the configuration of IIS has been done through WMI, Appcmd, PowerShell, and graphically through IIS Manager. All of these technologies have continued to serve their purpose, allowing users to configure the web server to meet their needs. Recently the IIS team has been working on a project to open up IIS configuration even more by creating a REST API that exposes the configuration system. This API is not meant to replace any of the existing configuration access mechanisms, but stand beside them and offer an open method for interacting with IIS. The REST API communicates with HTTPS making it accessible from any device that knows how to send a web request. This allows IIS to be configured more freely and opens the door for configuration clients that were not possible before, such as mobile applications.
Today we want to not only let everyone know that we are working on a REST API for IIS, we also want to let you see it. The API that we have created has a built in tool called the API Explorer that allows those with access to the API to browse the entire API surface. This means once you have a link to the root URL of the API you can navigate to this tool and browse all of the API that is available. Here is a picture of the API Explorer in action displaying an application pool resource.
A set of functions to dump OUs, Users, Groups and GPOs from one Active Directory and mirror them to another, test Active Directory. Perfect for creating a test environment.
I’ve lost count of the number of Wi-Fi routers I’ve been through over the last ten years, most ranging from just OK to the plain terrible. When I started experiencing problems with WI-FI connectivity a few months ago, I decided once again it was time to replace my router, and after lots of research, I picked the Asus RT-AC66U.
A new update is available for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. This update requires manual steps in order to complete the installation. While the KB itself covers those steps, this post provides additional details on the release.
If its happen that you like to run your honeypot on a Windows system then Honeyport is something worth to try.
Honeyports is a powershell script that will Creates a job that listens on TCP Ports specified and when a connection is established, it can either simply log or add a local firewall rule to block the host from further connections.
The script is written by John Hoyt, Carlos Perez and Greg Foss and it’s available on https://github.com/Pwdrkeg/honeyport/
Hi all, Herbert Mauerer here. In this post we’re back to talk about the built-in AD Diagnostics Data collector set available for Active Directory Performance (ADPERF) issues and how to ensure a useful report is generated when your DCs are under heavy load.
One of the most noticeable things about Windows 10, as compared to previous iterations of the Microsoft operating system, is the amount of time it takes for the first logon—that is, the logon time when a user doesn’t have a profile on the local machine.
Hello, Ryan Ries here again with some juicy new Active Directory hotness. Windows Server 2016 is right around the corner, and it’s bringing a ton of new features and improvements with it. Today we’re going to talk about one of the new things you’ll be seeing in Active Directory, which you might see referred to as “expiring links,” or what I like to call “temporary group memberships.”
One of the challenges that every security-conscious Active Directory administrator has faced is how to deal with contractors, vendors, temporary employees and anyone else who needs temporary access to resources within your Active Directory environment. Let’s pretend that your Information Security team wants to perform an automated vulnerability scan of all the devices on your network, and to do this, they will need a service account with Domain Administrator privileges for 5 business days. Because you are a wise AD administrator, you don’t like the idea of this service account that will be authenticating against every device on the network having Domain Administrator privileges, but the CTO of the company says that you have to give the InfoSec team what they want.
(Trust me, this stuff really happens.)
Hi all, Ned here again with a quick chat about mixing Continuous Availability and Offline Files. As you know, we have severalpublic docs recommending against combining CA and Client Side Caching (aka CSC aka Offline Files) because when users attempt to go offline, it will take up to six minutes. This usually leads to unhappy humans and applications. Today I’ll explain more and give you some options.
The proper way to remove a DC server in an Active Directory infrastructure is to run DCPROMO and remove it. The following video provides an example of these steps...
In the previous post, we installed Ubuntu in a VirtualBox VM. Now it’s time to install SAMBA and configure the domain controller.
Another day, another sensational report from Forbes. Oh my goodness, is Windows 10 really "phoning home" thousands of times a day? Nope. in fact, anyone who has even a basic understanding of how networks work should cringe at this shoddy report.
First things first, do not panic.
This article will guide you through the process of cleaning a hacked WordPress website. The process is documented in an easy to follow step by step format; identifying the source of the hack, identifying the infection, cleaning the code, regaining control of your WordPress website or blog and removing the Google malware alert. This guide will help you recover from the typical WordPress hacks such as backdoors, malware, spam and other similar types of infections.
In the last post of this series, I described how to prepare your VirtualBox environment. In today’s post, I’ll show you how to install the Ubuntu server with the help of the netboot.xyz iPXE .iso.
Fast startup was introduced in Windows 8 and uses session 0 hibernation to save the kernel state to disk. Reading the kernel state from disk is 30 to 70 percent faster than a full system initialization on most systems.
While fast startup should be beneficial in most cases, especially in combination with UEFI, it can also be problematic. For example, I’ve come across systems that refuse to connect to wireless networks without a cold boot, assumedly due to a problem with the reinitialized driver. But if an updated driver doesn’t solve the problem, you might want to disable fast startup.
If you want to run a domain controller on your network but don’t have access to a Windows Server license, you can use SAMBA, the free open-source software, and VirtualBox, the free virtualization software. We’ll describe the procedure for setting up a virtual server using VirtualBox and netboot.xyz iPXE and move on to setting up your domain controller with SAMBA.
After months of complaints, Microsoft has finally opened a Windows 10 Update History web site that will document the changes it makes to its flagship OS.
A new preview release model for the PowerShell ISE
The biggest news is that we've developed a new strategy to ship a separate preview edition of the PowerShell ISE. This enables us to add new features and release them to all of you much faster than before. Previously you had to wait for new Windows or WMF releases before you would get an updated ISE. Thanks to the PowerShell Gallery, we can now ship the Windows PowerShell ISE Preview as often as we like!
If you have ever used the search feature in Windows 10, and there is a good chance you have, there is a new way to filter search results that should help you find what you are looking for, faster. It looks like this feature was added in a recent update and if you haven’t tried it yet, here’s how it works ...Source : Thurrott.com
Early on in many penetration test or security assessment, you will often find yourself wading through what seems like hundreds or thousands of text files, each seemingly hundreds or thousands of pages long (likely because they are). One key to success in these situations is to automate the analysis of these files as much as possible – you want to get the “drudgery” job done and move on to subsequent tasks that need real eyes on the screen and hands on the keyboard.
Let’s look at NMAP for instance. It’s a valuable tool, we all use it. But if you are scanning a /16 or a /8 network (or even lots of /24’s), the volume of output can be .. daunting? .. significant? .. collosal ?
A new hotfix is available that enables Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) on a Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2 to sync and distribute feature upgrades for Windows 10. Note that this hotfix is not required to enable WSUS to sync and distribute servicing updates for Windows 10. This hotfix also addresses an issue where Windows 10 computers are displayed as Windows Vista.
Building on our last conversation about HTTPS and Powershell, let’s look at another common thing you’d do with HTTPS in a system administrator, or in a security assessment or penetration test – let’s assess the HTTPS certificates themselves.
As indicated in a previous post, we are making changes to WSUS 4.0 and later that will provide a smoother Windows 10 servicing experience. Because WSUS 3.0 SP2 is already in extended support (receiving no support at all after July 2017), and we are not shipping these improvements further down-level, it is a good idea to start planning your WSUS migration now. Here is some guidance on how to respond to the recent changes based on your current situation, with the assumption that you intend to deploy Windows 10 in your environment.
Microsoft is please to announce the final release of the security configuration baseline settings for Windows 10 version 1511, also known as "November Update," "Build 10586," "Threshold 2," or "TH2." The downloadable attachment to this blog post includes importable GPOs, tools for applying the GPOs to local GPO, custom ADMX files for Group Policy settings, and all the settings in spreadsheet form. We will also be publishing SCM .CAB files for this Windows 10 baseline shortly, and will announce their availability on the Security Guidance blog. (Note that we will not be providing updated SCM .CAB files for the IE11 guidance. For that content, see the attachment on this blog post.)
Policy Analyzer is a utility for analyzing and comparing sets of Group Policy Objects (GPOs). It can highlight when a set of Group Policies has redundant settings or internal inconsistencies, and can highlight the differences between versions or sets of Group Policies. It can also compare GPOs against current local policy settings and against local registry settings. And you can export its findings to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
One of the great additions to PowerShell 5.0 is the new information stream. You can use this stream as a logging mechanism in your scripts and functions, which is something I want to demonstrate today.
In the first article of this series, I taught you how to install and configure the Git version control system (VCS) to help you manage your Windows PowerShell scripts. Today, you'll learn how to sync your PowerShell scripts between your computers.
Software as a service (or SaaS) is a relatively new model of how a lot of software companies are conducting their business today – often to great success. So it comes as no surprise that malware writers and cyber crooks are attempting to adopt this model for their own nefarious purposes. In the past year a whole bunch of these “Ransomware as a Service” campaigns appeared, like for example Tox, Fakben or Radamant. Today we want to spotlight the newest of these campaigns.
PowerSploit is an offensive security framework for penetration testers and reverse engineers. It was born out of the realization that PowerShell was the ideal post-exploitation utility in Windows due to its ability to perform a wide range of administrative and low-level tasks all without the need to drop malicious executables to disk, thus, evading antivirus products with ease.
Hello everyone, this is Ayesha Mascarenhas on the Remote Desktop team. We released the Remote Desktop client preview for Mac in August this year. Over the last few months many of you have shared feedback and feature suggestions. Today, I’m sharing with you some of the updates we have made to the Remote Desktop client preview app for Mac since it was first released.
In the second week of this month, Microsoft had alerted Windows Live Mail 2012 users that some chnages are coming to users of Microsoft accounts like Outlook, Live, Hotmail, MSN accounts that may prevent mails being delivered to Windows Live Mail 2012. And it said, in order to continue using this Mail client, you need to install this update.(Update for Windows Live Essentials Mail 2012 (KB3093594) )
You’ve adopted an Android smart phone, but your contacts, email, and calendaring information are tied up in your Outlook.com or Office 365 account. No worries, you can access it all from Android, and even make sure that your phone calls and text messages correctly identify who’s reaching out to you.
The best news? You can make this work no matter which apps you choose to use to manage your contacts, email and calendar.
When using WPScan you can scan your WordPress website for known vulnerabilities within the core version, plugins, and themes. You can also find out if any weak passwords, users, and security configuration issues are present. The database atwpvulndb.com is used to check for vulnerable software and the WPScan team maintains the ever-growing list of vulnerabilities.
Last time, we taught you how to install WPScan on Mac and Linux.
This time we are going to dive into how to use WPScan with the most basic commands.Source : Sucuri Blog
NirSoft released the free MMCSnapInsView tool that allows you to view and launch all MMC snap-ins that are installed on a Windows computer.Source : MMCSnapInsView – MMC snap-in launcher
Concurrent Remote Desktop allows you (the administrator) to simultaneously use a client computer while a standard user is still interactively using it. For IT, this is huge! Imagine never having to kick a person off of their computer because you need to work on it. Concurrent Remote Desktop (CRDP) makes this possible. This guide will cover CRDP setup for Windows 10.Source : DeployHappiness
About 4 months ago we decided to deliver what the community clearly needs: A WordPress Security Learning Center. We all put our noses to the grindstone and worked as quickly and effectively as we could. We brought in video producers, designers, copywriters and security experts from around the community.
Today we are ready to announce the completion and official launch of our WordPress Security Learning Center.
Microsoft released KB 3095113 to enable future Windows 10 feature upgrades. Whether you will deploy upgrades or not, you need to know what this hotfix does and how not applying it can break WSUS.Source : 4sysops
Well today's news gives WLW a fresh lease on life as open source software. That means the opportunity is once again available to build a robust community around the software and see it thrive.Source : SuperSite for Windows
If you tried out the previews of Windows 10, you may have seen the experimental options in the command prompt. Now that it's released, the Experimental tab in the Properties dialog is gone, but the key features are still there – just slotted into the other tabs.
To see what's available, right-click on the title bar of a command prompt window and choose Properties if you want to only change the current command window, or Defaults if you want to change every command window you open.
Source : www.techradar.com
Windows 10 Enterprise comes with quite a few interesting features that Windows 10 Pro lacks. In this post, I summarize these additional features and link to further information.Source : 4sysops
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of reading these sensational headlines: “Windows 10 is Stealing Your Bandwidth!” and “Windows 10 is Costing You Extra Money!” and so forth. By the end of this article, you’ll understand a thing or two about Windows Update Delivery Optimization (WUDO), how to control its behavior, and what you can do to minimize the likelihood of running over your ISP account’s bandwidth limit.Source : 4sysops
If you have the task of performing an Active Directory migration from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2, there are a number of steps that you must complete for a smooth transition.Source : 4sysops
Using the CreateFromDirectory and ExtractToDirectory methods, it is possible to compress and extract files. In this tip I will show different constructors that can be used to either compress or extract files using this class. The following example will compress the files stored in the c:\testing folder:
Source : PowerShell Magazine
Microsoft has released their iOS app “Outlook” today. And it will break your companies security for mobile PIM access in multiple ways! No matter if you’re a Microsoft Exchange or IBM Notes Traveler customer. I cannot believe that Microsoft has done what they’ve done. Even as a non-Microsoft guy I would have expected that they obey the rules of common company security rules.Read it : {rene.winkelmeyer}
Microsoft has quietly added Office Remote—previously a Windows Phone exclusive—to the Google Play Store, allowing users of that platform to remotely control PowerPoint 2013 presentations on a Windows PC. There’s no official announcement about the app yet, so it’s possible that an iOS version of the app is coming as well, perhaps as soon as today.
While studying up on Windows 10, I came across a technique that has been shown to reduce the time it takes to apply an OS WIM to disk by 20 – 50%*. That’s a fairly significant savings in time and the implementation of this technique is relatively easy and does not require you to change how you deploy Windows. Believe it or not, the savings come from adjusting the OS power management settings during a deployment. While there are multiple ways to implement these power management settings, below I’ve outlined what I consider the most non-intrusive to existing deployment methods.
Source : Reducing Windows Deployment time using Power Management - The Deployment Guys
In its drive to integrate OneDrive deeply with all of its core products, Microsoft has made the open and save operations in Office 2013 a bit ponderous. If you’re already syncing your OneDrive content to the PC—or if you intend to only use local folders regardless—you can configure various Office applications to open and save files more efficiently. Here’s how.
Source : Office 2013 Tip: Skip the Cloud Integration - Thurrott.com
DFS Replication Initial Sync in Windows Server 2012 R2: Attack of the Clones NedPyle [MSFT] 21 Aug 2013 5:18 PM 9 Hi folks, Ned here again. By now, you know that DFS Replication has some major new features in Windows Server 2012 R2. Today I talk about one of the most radical: DFSR database cloning. Prepare for a long post, this has a walkthrough…
Today we are releasing MS15-011 & MS15-014 which harden group policy and address network access vulnerabilities that can be used to achieve remote code execution (RCE) in domain networks. The MS15-014 update addresses an issue in Group Policy update which can be used to disable client-side global SMB Signing requirements, bypassing an existing security feature built into the product. MS15-011 adds new functionality, hardening network file access to block access to untrusted, attacker controlled shares when Group Policy refreshes on client machines. These two updates are important improvements that will help safeguard your domain network.
Today, we announced the release of Outlook for iOS and a preview of Outlook for Android. If you have an iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android tablet, chances are that you’re using the built-in email and calendaring capabilities of your device. Why use the new Outlook app instead? We’re glad you asked!
Source : A deeper look at Outlook for iOS and Android - Office Blogs
Last week, I wrote on the arrival of Microsoft’s security bulletin MS14-066, containing a security update addressing several vulnerabilities in the Secure Channel. Yesterday, Microsoft issued an updated version of the update.
Source : The things that are better left unspoken | Update on MS14-066
References : It’s time to update your Secure Channel (MS14-066, CVE-2014-6321)
LAN Speed Test Lite is a very simple network performance test utility that doesn’t have to be installed. You can simply launch it from your USB stick and then measure the upload and download speed for a network share of your choice. After you click Start Test, you can configure the size of the file you want to use for the test.
Source : FREE: Network performance test – LAN Speed Test Lite - 4sysops
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is quickly becoming the most used data-interchange format. XML enjoyed the top spot for a long time but slowly people have been moving towards JSON. JSON is a first-class citizen in Windows PowerShell. With many automation frameworks and software products adopting JSON, it is important for system administrators to understand what is JSON and how to use it. This article is a JSON primer to give you an overview of this data-interchange format and how to use it.
Source : PowerShell Magazine » A JSON primer for administrators
Anyone who is familiar with RDCMan will be thrilled to hear that there is an updated version available! For those of you who are new to RDCMan – it is a tool that allows you to easily manage multiple remote desktop sessions:
Source : Update for RDCMan - Ben Armstrong - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
Onetastic is a free multi-purpose addin for Microsoft OneNote 2010 and 2013.
Includes OneCalendar
Source : Onetastic for OneNote
ABC-Update is a free command-line tool that allows you to install Windows updates. It is easy to use and gives you the flexibility of deploying only specific updates in your scripts.
Source : FREE: ABC-Update – Install Windows updates at the command prompt - 4sysops
NEW YORK — Nov. 12, 2014 — On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. reinforced its commitment to cross-platform developer experiences by open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack and expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms. Microsoft also released Visual Studio Community 2013, a new free edition of Visual Studio that provides easy access to the Visual Studio core toolset. The announcements kicked off Microsoft’s Connect (); event, where the company released Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview.
I think that I will start this Diary with the following statement: If you use an open source CMS, and you do not update it frequently, there is a very high chance that your website if not only compromised but also part of a botnet.
"You should proceed under the assumption that every Drupal 7 website was compromised unless updated or patched before Oct 15th, 11pm UTC, that is 7 hours after the announcement"
Source : InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog - The Wonderful World of CMS strikes again
If you have read some of my previous blog posts and IIS.NET articles about WebDAV, you will see that I often use the WebDAV Redirector that is built-in to Windows in order to connect to various WebDAV websites. This allows me to access my files via a mapped drive letter, which also enables me to use WebDAV with applications that do not have native WebDAV support. (Like Visual Studio.) I'm also a big fan of OneDrive, but sometimes I'm on a legacy system where I don't have OneDrive installed. With that in mind, I thought that I would put together a quick blog series to show you how to map a drive letter to your OneDrive files.
Source : http://blogs.iis.net/
The other day I was troubleshooting 100% CPU utilization on a SQL Server 2008 database server. The server had 100 or so databases of varying sizes however none were larger than a few hundred MB and each database had a corresponding web site on a separate web server. Since the server hosted quite a few databases the high CPU needed to be resolved quickly because it was causing issues for everyone. High CPU on a database server can often be symptomatic of a issues occurring outside the server. In this case the real issue was in fact being caused by a SQL Injection attack on a web server.
Source : Solving SQL Server High CPU with IIS Request Filtering | Peter Viola
Another one of the great built-in features of IIS 8 is Dynamic IP Restrictions (DIPR). With a few simple configuration steps you can quickly set limits for blocking IP addresses based on the number of concurrent requests or frequency of requests over a period time. With these parameters in place IIS will take over blocking requests unattended thereby making your server more secure.
Source : Preventing Automated Attacks with IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions | Peter Viola
Microsoft is pleased to announce the final release of security baseline settings for Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Internet Explorer 11. Some of the highlights of the new security baselines (many of which we intend to backport to older versions of Windows and IE):
- Use of new and existing settings to help block some Pass the Hash attack vectors;
- Recommendations to control the storage of plaintext-equivalent passphrases;
- Blocking the use of web browsers on domain controllers;
- Incorporation of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) into the standard baselines;
- Removal of the recommendation to enable "FIPS mode" (this is discussed in greater detail in this blog post: Why We’re Not Recommending “FIPS Mode” Anymore);
- Removal of almost all service startup settings, and all server role baselines that contain only service startup settings.
Source : Microsoft Security Guidance
We have made a small number of changes in the baseline security guidance for Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Internet Explorer 11 since we released the beta version of our guidance last April. This blog post discusses those changes and the reasons for them.
Source : blogs.technet.com/b/secguide
Microsoft released the new Sysinternals tools, Sysmon, which allows you to monitor Windows process creations, file creation time changes, and network connections in the Windows Event Log.
Source : 4sysops.com
Many online articles suggests using the MakeCert.exe tool available in the Windows SDK for creating a self-signed certificate, but now there is an easier approach available.
New-SelfSignedCertificate-DnsNametest.powershellmagazine.com-CertStoreLocationcert:\LocalMachine\My
Source : PowerShell Magazine » #PSTip Generating a self-signed certificate
Don't waste your time trying to understand what this blog is about or why is there so many unrelated news in it (from Formula 1 to computer programming). It's simply my own personal blog where I can put any information I like.
