Category: Other

Surface Hub at home

The Microsoft Surface Hub is a gigantic whiteboard on steroids. It allows you to .. (dhu) Whiteboard, but also allows you to join meetings through Skype or Teams, load PowerPoint/Word documents, connect you to your Office 365 services and much much more. Now the device in itself is special already, with many Mic’s and Camera’s […]

Read more

Managing Hyper-V Standalone with OSX

Hyper-V server is the free virtualization OS from Microsoft to compete head to head with the free ESXi OS. When running in large farms or domain joined, Hyper-V seems to work pretty decently. But when you just want a single host that you manage with Windows 10, or let alone MacOS, Hyper-V can become a […]

Read more

USG VPN’s and Dynamic IP’s

Running a Unifi USG gateway does have its challenges every now and then. One of my friends asked me how I would solve the problem of dynamic IP addresses being used in a S2S VPN configuration. Now normally, when you look at the USG documentation, if the S2S is managed by a single USG controller […]

Read more

High-Available Architectures and SLA impact

Basis of SLA’s An SLA is an agreement on service availability, performance and responsiveness. In this paper, only the availability SLA part is addressed. When indicating SLA’s however in this document, we are talking about the Minimum time a service or component needs to be available, or the maximum time allowed to be down. When […]

Read more

Breaking the 1Gbps barrier with Synology and Windows 10

[Update: seems even a Surface Pro 6 with docking station is capable of using SMB multi-channel using 2 NIC’s.. if you use the onboard NIC on the docking station, but also the USB-Ethernet converter in the dock’s USB port, you can actually achieve 2Gbps speeds as well! And, with the upgrade to a 10Gb switch, […]

Read more

Even strong passwords are… stupid

While this blog is mostly focused around passwords and how to ensure people can login, the new direction within Microsoft is to get rid of passwords. I can already feel the shock from many security officers reading this post, but hear us (eeuh Microsoft) out on this one. Passwords are by default unsecure, they require […]

Read more

Azure Stack Development Kit – Deployment overview (troubles)

Side Note: The experience of ASDK as described in this post are based on the late July bits of Azure Stack on a Dell T710. Future experience might (I certainly hope so..) be better and more integrated..  The T710 described in an earlier topic was purchased to run Azure Stack. And while I’m still waiting […]

Read more

The hardware

Sometimes I get the question; what do you work with.? as in .. which computers.. and to provide an answer: This “oh look at my hardware” post.. or more like “the hardware pissing contest equivalent” on many of the blogs.. In short, I don’t like to buy brand new stuff.. its expensive, it looses value like […]

Read more

PowerBI Gateway and Proxies

The PowerBI Gateway can be used to connect on-premises database sources into PowerBI, Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps and PowerApps. The advantages are many, and if installed correctly it will work flawlessly. However, the default install of the connector is based on the gateway being able to connect directly to the internet. While it’s the fastest […]

Read more

Pass the Hash

When you create a new forest or new domain, you use the Domain Admin credentials. Through the use of the “Administrator” account you can control each and every workstation and server. You can install Exchange, System Center products and much much more. But Microsoft is probably thinking twice now about the framework they have chosen wherein the Administrator is master of your infrastructure.

As the Administrator account is so powerful, it’s a sweet spot for hackers, the target to get. And that’s probably why many people rename the administrator account to Guest (and vice versa) or something else. Many others keep the Administrator name but change the password to a very long one including special characters, but even that seems futile, by the discovery of an advanced hacking technique called Pass The Hash.

Read more