TEAMAS

What have I learnt in the last week or so? Resetting domain admin password I had an old Exchange 2010 lab environment which I needed to use to test some TLS settings.  I booted it up, typed my password and bam.....not accepted. I tried a few variations of the password and nothing!  Scratching my head and a Google later I came across this https://4sysops.com/archives/forgot-the-domain-admin-password/ This blog post describes how you can use the Windows ISO to open command prompt on the DC, replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe.  Boot up the DC again and then click the Accessibility option on the login screen. Instead of launching utilman.exe it launches cmd.exe.  More crucially, it does this under the SYSTEM context.  So basically you have access to the whole machine.  A net use command later and the admin password is reset. It worked perfectly, but it is rather unsettling.  If this was being used as a mechanism to attack your network, you can protect yourself in a few ways

What have I learnt this week? Wireless Whilst 5GHz channels do not overlap, it all depends on how your access points are configured.  We found that setting up different APs on adjacent channels seemed good, but realised that the APs was broadcasting 80mhz wide and therefore caused overlap. We reduced this down to 40Mhz which decreased the interference but it is also worth bearing in mind that narrowing this channel will slightly decrease total throughput. I found this decent webpage which covers the above and other Enterprise WiFi considerations. http://www.metageek.com/training/resources/design-dual-band-wifi.html On this, I updated my WiFi logging powershell script.  It collects data every 2 seconds and includes channel being used which is useful for the above. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 While ( $a = 1) { Try { Sleep 2 $time = Get-Date -Format T $ping

I had planned on completing one of these blog posts each day, but it became apparent on Friday that this was clearly a step too far. Work has been crazy busy at the moment and when I get home I would rather spend time with the family than make blogging my number 1 priority! Anywho, the plan is to make these a little less regular, maybe once a week. So what have I learnt this week? Amazon Dash Ariel Dash Button Amazon released the Amazon Dash button in the UK last week.  The idea is that you put a branded button in certain locations around your home.  When you run out of a specific item (e.g. washing powder) you press the Ariel Amazon Dash button on your washing machine.  This will contact Amazon and get your Ariel product delivered the next day. Neat idea, slightly overkill I think, but neat! But how does it work?  How long do they last? Well I came across this pretty decent teardown blog post from Matthew Petroff . https://mpetroff.net/2015/05/amazon-dash-button

Azure AD domains So you may remember that a couple of days ago I blogged that it was only possible to have one domain associated with an Azure AD tenant.  Well this is kind of true, but not entirely. In fact, in Azure AD you can add the same domain name to different AD tenants without any error message whatsoever.  It is only at the point where you verify the domain that it pops up with this error. Windows programs on Chromebooks I saw this tweet earlier today There is a piece of software called Crossover which is currently in preview.  It will allow you to run Windows applications on Intel based Chromebooks.  I wrote a blogpost a while back which explained why I wouldn't buy a Chromebook .  This piece of software will potentially eliminate these type of concerns. I am currently looking at purchasing a cheap laptop to replace my Asus UL20a which is pretty old now.  The laptop is fine, but the battery is fairly knackered (2 hours max).  I was looking at HP St