Posts made by lance

How does everyone feel about about this setup? It says it could be used in enterprise, but is there any benefits if your firewall already has IDS? Is this more geared towards home use?

http://www.austintaylor.io/suricata/elasticsearch/logstash/continuous/monitoring/intrusion/detection/system/2016/12/17/build-a-world-class-monitoring-system-enterprise-small-office-home/

@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

@Breffni-Potter said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

Ubiquiti gear is so much better, it's worth spending the money not to be saddled with Meraki stuff

Wow. Sorry for trying to give people access to free gear.

Attended the webinar, spoke to Cisco rep afterwards, did not want to send the gear. Number of Meraki installs I've done = 0. Number of Ubiquity installs = Lots.

Cisco lost out on a lot of sales over that 1 botched webinar.

Yeah, to some degree the whole thing is a scam. If they want you as a customer, they send the gear without the webinar. If they think you are just going to use it at home or aren't going to be a big advocate for them, they don't send the promised gear even after you've "paid" for it by spending time in their marketing talk. They aren't honest and that alone is a reason to never use them - you can't trust them and as a security vendor, that's kind of important. You don't want con artists with control of your firewall and networking gear!

The more I search through reddit.com/r/homelab the more asshatery I find about not getting the gear. I'm going to challenge the Cisco rep that has been e-mailing me to just send me the gear without the webinar knowing it won't happen and in the meanwhile pickup some Ubiquiti stuff.

@travisdh1 Thanks! Great post that you linked to.

@scottalanmiller Gotcha. Do you or @Dashrender know of any way to get Ubiquiti gear for cheap? Is there any reason not to buy used or older Ubiquiti gear?

@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

It should never depend. They promise it and only sometimes deliver.

That's a good point! It's good to be reminded that we should expect more out of our vendors, because it seems like more and more these day promise everything, but don't deliver.

@Dashrender said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

I don't see a need to delete the post, or even the followup posts - if you're happy with a product, definitely feel free to talk about it.

I guess I was taken aback at first because of all of the other positive things I've read from people using them. I kind of reacted out of haste.

@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

Two because they know it is only valuable when you own lots of it and pay for their continuing accounts so they will make money anyway.

You do get three year licenses with it.

@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:

Ubiquiti gear is so much better, it's worth spending the money not to be saddled with Meraki stuff

Wow. Sorry for trying to give people access to free gear.

I've heard a couple cases of people not getting the gear, but it seems like it depends on the contact you have from Cisco after the webinars.

@scottalanmiller This post was geared more towards adding tech to a homelab that you don't have extra cash for and not something I would do for enterprise.

I recently built a homelab for my CCNA studies and came across some free Merkai gear while searching for my hardware. If you sign up for their webinars https://meraki.cisco.com/webinars they give you a piece of their hardware for each webinar. Below is what they are giving away. Have fun.

MX64, firewall appliance with advanced security license
MS220-8P, 8x RJ45 + 2x SFP (not SFP+) PoE switch
MR18, 802.11n AP

EDIT: You must have a business e-mail when signing up.

This is what worked for me https://ronbokleman.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/how-to-move-windows-azure-active-directory-sync-from-one-machine-to-another/

Hi Everyone,

Last fall we worked with a group of consultants and migrated from an on-prem exchange server to Office365. Everything was working great until a couple days ago when our PDC with DirSync on it started to act up and eventually started to fail.

I created a new domain controller, installed the DHCP, DNS, AD and seized the roles from the bad server. I was not part of the process when the consultants setup DirSync and was hoping someone could point me to some instructions on what I need to do to install and get DirSync working on the new server.

Thanks!

Done

Great Article about Importance and Urgency when dealing with issues. It's a really good read and thought I would share it here.
http://olivergearing.com/get-your-priorities-right-part-two-the-important-vs-urgent-matrix/

Just wondering if anyone has tried to spin up a desktop pool with a Windows 10 yet?

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

What is your take on moving to a new server OS upon release?

This is a tough discussion as there are many factors. But the first one I want to consider is... what do you consider a "new release?" In the Linux world, where numbering tends to be very straightforward, let's talk about RHEL / CentOS.

With RHEL, it is common for people to wait on major releases (RHEL 4, 5, 6 or 7) for a month or two before really starting to deploy, normally by having them in their labs first to test application compatibility. It is very rare that someone has a stability concern with even new major releases as a key part of the goals of a major release is to address stability. But there is cause for some concern due to the number of changes so a blended approach can make sense.

Generally, however, minor released (RHEL 6.1, 6.2, 6.3) are not something that you wait for because they are incremental patches, service packs, if you will. They don't represent a core change to the system although they might bring new functionality, they are small changes that are supposed to represent another six months (or whatever) upgrades whether security, stability, new features (rare), etc.

When talking Windows you have to look at the Windows NT numbers to know what you are looking at. Windows NT 6.0 (Server 2008) and its family are still continuing today. NT 6.1 was 2008 R2. NT 6.2 was 2012. NT 6.3 was 2012 R2. And NT 6.4 is Windows Server 10.

When Windows Server 10 releases, which is really at the core of what we are discussing here, we are not talking about a "new" OS, IMHO, but we are talking about a small, incremental, late lifecycle upgrade from 6.3 to 6.4 with some new features (new FEATURES might be avoided, but not the OS itself) and lots of security, stability and performance upgrades to the core OS.

Not only will Windows Server 10 be a minor release (incremental) but it will also be out months after its desktop iteration is releases. So the OS itself will have quite a bit of field time both in desktop protection and in Server RC candidates before being released as production.

So even if you consider Windows Server 10 to be a new OS, which I do not at all, both because of faith in the vendor's diligence and the heavy industry use of the product before production release I would consider it battle tested even on release day.

But truly, think of it only as a minor update and not a new OS and suddenly the reasons to deploy it become very clear. This isn't "new code" but is, in reality, the most mature, well tested version of the NT 6 family. As a late release, it is the oldest, not the newest, copy of the code.

I thought I read some where that Microsoft is making the jump from 6.4 to 10, which will be the first time the os and kernel match. I could be wrong though.

Here is a interesting list of DNS providers http://thesimplecomputer.info/a-list-of-dns-service-providers

@scottalanmiller said:

Nice find.

Thanks. I have a love hate relationship with Jade at the moment. I'm sure after I get used to working with it I will like it, just like almost everyone else.

I found this Jade bootstrap page here https://rajasegar.github.io/JADE-Bootstrap/index.html I thought I would post it here for future reference and for anyone else who is starting out with Jade.