Recently I’ve been playing with some Nvidia/Mellanox switches specifically the SN2410. An issue that I ran into was that I didn’t have the BIOS password. All of the documentation says that the default BIOS password is admin. That password did not work on my switch. You can absolutely use the switch even without the BIOS…
On Lenovo servers the default configuration has a physical presence policy enabled. When a physical presence policy is enabled it prevents you from doing a few tasks on the system either in BIOS or IPMI. Lenovo calls their IPMI XClarity Controller (XCC). With an enabled physical presence policy your only options to do some of…
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…
