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Upgrade Palo Alto Firewall HA Pair (Active/Passive)
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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 HA Pair (Active/Passive) with CLI for more details.

Quick Cheat Sheet

Long Cheat Sheet

Upgrade path and sanity checks

For my example, FW01 is the Primary firewall and currently Active firewall and FW02 is the Secondary firewall and currently Passive firewall and they are both running PAN-OS 10.1 version 10.1.6-h6 which is the current preferred release for that version. We will be upgrading them to PAN-OS 10.2 version 10.2.2-h2 which is the current preferred release for that version.

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Azure AD Connect 2.0 Won’t Start
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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 at the event logs it looks like the chain of events was that it tried to do the auto upgrade as auto upgrade is enabled but then failed to restart the SQLLocalDB due to the corruption which then caused Azure AD Connect to break.

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Setting Up Cloudflare Access
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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 problem is common with legacy web applications and very common with SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) web applications. The issue I was trying to solve was how to put MFA in front of a SCADA web application.

I decided to use Cloudflare Access. Cloudflare Access goes by a few names some of them are Cloudflare Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloudflare Access, and Cloudflare Zero Trust Access. For simplicity I’m going to refer to it as Cloudflare Access.

Cloudflare Access is really nice because you can put it in front of any web application and it will require the user to authenticate before they can even reach the website.

If you have a lot of applications like this you can even set it up so the users can login to a portal to see all of the applications that are available to them. You can do all of this without the user having to install anything. What’s even better is that it’s free for 50 users.

Here’s how I setup a SCADA web app with Cloudflare Access.

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Windows Recovery Partition
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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 that rabbit hole.

Your Windows partitioning will look something like this.

Disk Partitioning with Recovery Partition
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geoSCOUT published remote access
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I needed to get geoSCOUT working in Omnissa Horizon (formerly VMware Horizon) but geoLOGIC doesn’t officially support publishing geoSCOUT to systems like Citrix, RD Web, and Horizon. Due to the way that geoSCOUT works you can’t just launch the geoSCOUT exe and have it work.

On the first launch a user would normally run the geoSCOUT Desktop_Build_NonAdmin_v8.exe installer which will create the App Data and the document files for the user. The creation of the App Data part is important because that is when it creates the reference to the geoSCOUT license file. If you try to just run the geoSCOUT Desktop_Build_NonAdmin_v8.exe install file outside of the path of your geoSCOUT license file it won’t install correctly.

Now a way to get around the issue is to have the user RDP into your session host that is publishing the application and have them run the non admin installer but that isn’t very seamless and is very time consuming.

My solution was to write a PowerShell script that launches before the user launches geoSCOUT.

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FortiGate Hair-pinning
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I have been playing around with Policy mode on the FortiGate and an issue that I’ve ran into a few times is if you have something hosted internally that also needs to be accessed externally it doesn’t work internally when you use the external address, for example a reverse proxy.

In my setup I use a reverse proxy in front of my WordPress Docker containers. Due to this they are running on random ports. When I need to access them I need to use the external address not the LAN address. A half workaround that I was doing, was using CloudFlare proxied mode which did work but I wanted to fix it without needing to do that.

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FortiGate Deny Logs
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Something that’s annoyed me with FortiGates is that viewing the deny logs isn’t super straight forward. Part of the issue is the fact that Fortinet disables the deny log by default and if you don’t know where to look for it you might not figure it out by clicking around.

Fortinet says that they have the deny logs off by default to optimize the usage of logging space. I however want to see as much info as possible when possible, especially when troubleshooting.

Thankfully turning it on is easy, here’s how to do it and view it.

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Script to make Scripts
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It finally happened, I actually needed to make a script to write scripts. There’s been a few times where I needed to write multiple scripts that are basically the same minus a few variables and in the past I’ve just done this manually. An example of this is a BitDefender Gravity Zone install script, I have a basic PowerShell script that I use and the only items I need to change are the Gravity Zone ID and the company name.

However all of the scripts broke because the URL to get the BitDefender MSI changed and the MSI used to be in a ZIP file. Now all the PowerShell scripts are trying to download from a dead URL and are written to handle an MSI in a ZIP file.

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geoSCOUT 8.17 Launcher Upgrade
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With the release of geoSCOUT version 8.17 geoLOGIC upgraded the geoSCOUT launcher but only included an upgrade file that needs to be ran as admin on each system and under each user account. Which is annoying in company setups where users don’t have local admin.

Technically speaking geoSCOUT still works even if you don’t run the geoSCOUT 8.17 launcher upgrade, the users just don’t get some of the new features and that’s not fun.

One of the changes geoLOGIC made with geoSCOUT 8.17 is the shortcuts. In the past the shortcuts would be set to start in the user’s documents folder but now they are set to start in program files.

Typically a program needs to run as admin when it is changing things beyond what a normal user account can change like system settings or files. With the 8.17 geoSCOUT launcher it is updating the geoSCOUT exe in program files and updating the system wide start menu shortcut with the updated start in info.

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