All posts by bsdman

Currently working as an IT Manager. Worked for an OIT company as a Network Engineer in 2011. Worked for a Medical IT company as the Network Administrator 2009-2011. Worked as the Senior Systems Administrator at a computer reseller from 2005-2009. Worked as a Computer Consultant for several small companies from 2007-2009. Worked as a Computer Technician at a computer reseller from 2002-2004.
Linux

Gnome popos Linux

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I was reflecting on my tech career just last night and I thought it best to give a bit of background.

I grew up on Macs – a Macintosh SE with an 8MHz processor, 1MB RAM, a 720KB floppy drive, and a 20MB SCSI 25-pin hard disk drive. Running OS 6.

From there we acquired a PowerMac 7100/80AV. Had a 80MHz processor, 16MB RAM, 700MB 50-pin SCSI hard disk drive, and a 1.4MB FDD. Oh and a 2x CDROM – I fondly remember the sounds this would make when trying to load Myst. We also successfully upgraded this to 24MB RAM and replaced the 700MB HDD with a 2.1GB version.

The first internet-connected Mac was next: the PowerMac G3 minitower. This featured a 233MHz processor, 32MB RAM, and a 4GB HDD. The CDROM was a 24x, and the FDD was still there. Ours came with a 100MB Zip drive too. We upgraded to 64MB RAM, added a 12x CD Burner, and replaced the HDD with a 20GB eventually. This came with OS 8, and we attempted to load OSX beta and it was Slow AF.

A buddy and I decided we wanted to try our hands at Linux – I acquired an AMD K6-2 350MHz with 32MB RAM and a 40GB HDD. Playing around with ISA and PCI network cards was fun (10/100). We originally ran Redhat as an internet router, but when the install broke (my fault, but that’s how I learned breaking/fixing), I replaced with Slackware Linux instead.

At this time I started College and I got 2 computers – the first was a PowerMac G4 dual 450Mhz with 128MB RAM, 30GB HDD, and an external Firewire 12x CDBurner. This also had a 100MB Zip Drive. Eventually upgraded to 3x 80GB HDD in RAID5 along with 512MB RAM. Came with OS9 which I upgraded to OSX. The second was a custom built AMD – Asus Board with an AMD Athlon Thunderbird running at 1.4GHz, 40GB HDD, 24x CD Burner, and 128MB RAM – I believe I upgraded it to 256MB at some point. Ran Windows 2000 on this.

I bought a used white iBook 500MHz 64MB RAM 20GB Drive somewhere along the way – it was pretty slow even for the time.

It gets a bit hazy here since I started building PC’s for family and friends.

I bought a used HP Laptop – maybe like an N810 or something? It was back when HP/Compaq merged.

I got a couple laptops for free – gateway tablet and a EeePC (Asus netbook).

ANYWAY, since I’m getting wordy and not actually accomplishing anything, I wanted to say this was now the 3rd time in my career that I’ve attempted to go “Full Linux” on my work computer. The first time ended poorly when I kept breaking the installation (Ubuntu 8.04), the second time I had a systemboard die, although I was cheating on that – Running Linux MX with virtualbox running Win10.

Now I’m running PopOS. I have a VM of Win10 just in case, but overall I’ve been happy as a clam just using the linux OS. Slack, Cisco VPN, RDP, Browser.. it just works for me.

The only problem I had – being my first GNOME GUI – was the lack of a task bar at the bottom. Easy fix:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/

Microsoft

Date Last opened for all applications

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Because several applications are paid separately (Visio is the example) from the rest of O365, and we were running low on licenses (and we also didn’t have a Software Audit tool installed), I had to find the quick and dirty (ie cheap and fast) way of finding out the information required.

It was easy to pull who had a license associated with their account. Just log into the Admin Portal admin.microsoft.com, navigate under Billing > Licenses > click on the product.

In my case it’s Visio Plan 2. Licenses 0 available, 32 assigned.

Powershell to the rescue

$name = $env:COMPUTERNAME
$path = "\\fileserver.domain.tld\share\subdir\" + $name + "_lastusedApp.csv"
Get-ChildItem -Path ${env:ProgramFiles(x86)} -Filter "*.exe" -Recurse | Get-ItemProperty | select name,lastaccesstime | sort -Property lastaccesstime | Export-Csv -Path $path -Encoding ascii -NoTypeInformation

Just need to run that remotely on the system. You can psexec or I was trying to use the invoke-command but was coming up with lack of rights to run remote scripts and didn’t need to look any further.

The .csv then shows a list of all installed applications and the last time they were opened. Unfortunately if someone never reboots their system (uptime over a year or so) and keeps the application(s) open that entire time, it’ll appear as though they haven’t “used” it in the last year. Just something to keep in mind.

Linux

Tinypilot KVM

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I decided to get a tinypilot kvm device for testing purposes – it’s actually pretty neat. Sure I could have saved a few bucks by building it myself, but this way I save time and support someone else’s great ideas.

Anyway, to update the device, SSH to it (DNS name is generally tinypilot)

Login with tinypilot/flyingsopi

Run 

/opt/tinypilot/scripts/upgrade && sudo reboot

Microsoft

Corrupt User Profile

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Eventviewer was showing Event ID 1515 and I was logged in as with a temporary profile. No other user was experiencing this, so I went about fixing with REGEDIT.

  • Open Regedit
  • Start > Run > regedit
  • Navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\
  • Find any profiles with “.bak” in them
  • Delete the .bak entire subkey
  • Log off, log on
Microsoft

Windows Apps

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So this all started because I was unable to open the Windows Security Center. It just wouldn’t open.

I tried to open SecHealthUI.exe directly (C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.Windows.SecHealthUI*\) and that failed out. Eventviewer showed Faulting application name: sechealthui.exe, faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll. Someone wanted me to re-run the kernelbase.dll registry (regsvr32 kernelbase.dll) which doesn’t do anything unless you give yourself administrative privs to the kernelbase.dll file. And didn’t fix my issue anyway.

What did help me was re-installing all of the Windows Apps with the following powershell command:

  • windows key + x
  • Select Windows Powershell (Admin)
  • Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
  • Profit

And, because this is entitled “Widnows Apps”..

  • Uninstall XBox Windows-related items
  • Select Windows Powershell (Admin)
  • Get-AppXPackage *xboxapp* -AllUsers | Remove-AppXPackage
Linux

Enable SNMP on ESXi

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Inheriting 3 different companies’ worth of Virtual infrastructure is sometimes a giant PITA. This holds true especially when the 3 different companies all had multiple “admin’s” working at any given time without established standards for naming, setup, configuration, or even maintenance.

Some of the newly-installed VMWare equipment wasn’t showing up on my Nagios monitoring board. First step is to make sure that snmp is setup and actually running (hint, it was not).

I ended up at this auvik support site – and, if it wasn’t so expensive (our budget is about 1/3 of what it “should be” – I would be running this for monitoring of our infrastructure. Think of it as cloud prtg. https://support.auvik.com/hc/en-us/articles/206311526-How-to-enable-SNMP-on-a-VMware-ESXi-hypervisor#topic_esx6

Since we’re running ESXi 6.5 and 6.7 currently:

  • SSH to your ESXi box using the root account
  • esxcli system snmp set -r
  • esxcli system snmp set -c YOURCOMMUNITY
  • esxcli system snmp set -p 161
  • esxcli system snmp set -L "City, State, Country"
  • esxcli system snmp set -C noc@domain.tld
  • esxcli system snmp set -e yes

Or, if you’re using ESXi 7:

  • SSH to your ESXi box using the root account
  • esxcli system snmp set --communities YOURCOMMUNITY
  • esxcli system snmp set --enable true

Linux

Nagios Add User

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Yes, I’m a creature of habit. I started using Nagios back in 2005 and it was awful. I mean it “worked”, but I had no idea what I was doing. Reinstalling, installing, configuring, new jobs… each time I was learning from my previous mistakes and making it better. It’s now at the point I can perform most of the work without actually referencing anything else. But the point of this blog is for my own notes, so here goes.

  • SSH to your nagios server. I use putty from my primary Windows desktop.
  • Switch to root
    • sudo su -
  • Create the new web user account and password
    • htpasswd /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users MYNEWUSER
  • Enter the password twice

Sometimes you’ll receive an error message about “You do not have permission to view information for any of the services you requested”. So we’ll have to edit the cgi.cfg.

  • SSH to your nagios server
  • sudo su -
  • nano /usr/local/nagios/etc/cgi.cfg
  • Add the MYNEWUSER wherever necessary
    • authorized_for_system_information=nagiosadmin,userhere,MYNEWUSER