While I was looking into various ways to restore an ESXi config backup I came across a bug. If you read VMware’s documentation about how to restore an ESXi config backup (you can find that here) you will see that it is full of references saying the build numbers must match. The bug is that…
Knowing your ESXi Build Number can be very useful. It’s really easy to do with vCenter. Without vCenter it’s not as straight forward. Here are a few ways to get your build number when you don’t have vCenter. Console If you have access to the console of the ESXi host via IPMI or iLO or iDRAC…
I ran into an issue where some older Cisco Aironet APs (Access Points) stopped connecting to a Cisco WLC (Wireless LAN Controller). No config changes had been made and some of the Cisco Aironet APs would connect and some wouldn’t. All of them were the same model, the Cisco Aironet APs were able to ping…
Recently I needed to upgrade a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) system and while Cisco does have documentation about it. The process can be scary and could use more screenshots. Here is my step by step guide on how to upgrade a Cisco UCS via the Firmware Auto Install with the Cisco UCS Manager. Fully…
Recently I’ve ran into an issue with Microsoft Teams where the user sees a blocking message that says “Teams needs an update”. The user needs to action it before they can use Microsoft Teams again. Typically the user can just click on Update Teams which will take them to a download page for Microsoft Teams,…
There’s been a few times where I needed to setup access to an internal web application but I couldn’t put it on 443 or 80 because something else was using those ports and a reverse proxy would break one of the applications. A solution to this is Cloudflare Tunnel. Cloudflare Tunnel used to be called…
Palo Alto has some great documentation about how to do basically everything. Sometimes it’s a bit buried. These are my short and long cheat sheets for upgrading a Palo Alto Networks firewall in an Active/Passive High Availability Pair. If you want to preform the upgrade using CLI only please see my post Upgrade Palo Alto…
I recently ran into an issue where an install of Azure AD Connect failed to start. It seems like the root cause was due to the SQLLocalDB Model database becoming corrupt, which caused it to fail at upgrading itself. This is a known issue in versions older than 2.1.1.0 of Azure AD Connect. While looking…
I’ve been a fan of Cloudflare for a while now. I love how fast they can propagate DNS changes and I typically like to use them as a DNS resolver. An issue that I’ve ran into many times, is how to protect something with MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) that doesn’t have any support for MFA. This…
When you install Windows it always creates a Recovery Partition, which runs a very lite version of Windows with a few tools. There’s been a few times where I’ve used those tools to fix a system. I wanted to know what would happen if I deleted the Recovery Partition. This is what I found down…
