After over 6 straight years of actual larger-Enterprise (heavy Windows/Linux infrastructure) experience and 3 intense years of practice and self-study, I finally made MCSE: Server Infrastructure (2012 R2).

http://www.mycertprofile.com/Profile/1943383021

My real (relevant) experience hadn't started in a business environment until closer to 2004, but it has been a goal of mine since then.

It just feels good to have finally reached that goal in a good way.

My wife is becoming a U.S. citizen today. As well as everyone else on the bottom floor. People still coming in.

Some entertainment on the stage while everyone waits for the Oath Ceremony to begin.

I posted a guide on my blog about setting up a Fedora 26 KVM / QEMU hypervisor that uses the Kimchi-project for remote virtualization management, which includes a working web-based VM console.

Here's the link: https://www.timothygruber.com/linux/fedora-26-kvm-html5-remote-access-with-web-console-via-kimchi-part-1/

I hope it helps anyone who needs it as much as it would have helped me had I came across it a long time ago.

It's easy to create on my blog because I can copy/paste images into the editor... it's like working inside of MS Word.

I was thinking of recreating it on here for ML, but not sure if it's worth it or not, as well as the chance of hurting SEO.

Should I take the time to do it and just change the wording a bit?

@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:

I know y'all are concerned... Snapchat just went down.

Nope, the whole Snapchat company could disband and I'd never even know it (until you post about it).

@momurda said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Ordered 2 ssd from newegg. They show up in 2 8"x4"x3" boxes which are packaged inside a 24"x18"x4" box. And lots of those airbag things.
Literally could have fit hundreds of ssd in this packaging.

Now if one doesn't work, you need to ship it back inside of a refrigerator box...

@dustinb3403 said in Recommendations for Cameras:

He wants something "more serious looking" what does that even mean?

I have had great experience with these:

That VMQ thing can be an issue on 1 GB NICs with out-dated firmware/drivers. The info of affected drivers and NICs and the resolution can be found here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2986895/virtual-machines-lose-network-connectivity-when-you-use-broadcom-netxt

This is a good write-up and how to resolve it. Or you can just run firmware and driver updates.

VMQ should be disabled on 1 GB NICs. The issue with the broadcoms is that it's enabled by default, and shouldn't be.

I thought about paying for DuoLingo because I can't stand the ads all the time and lack of freedom.

But lately I have been doing a lot on Anki. There's some really great decks in there. I also paired it with Mango which has been great as well. Another one that is great is Beelingual when you want to start doing more reading.

TL;DR

Anki
Mango
Beelingual

@pete-s said in script to download and extract MicroSip portable:

@dashrender said in script to download and extract MicroSip portable:

I've been wanting a way to download the latest version of MicroSip portable.

I realize this doesn't ensure I'm getting the latest version of MicroSip - I'm relying on the lastest being the first listed item that's a portable version, but it's a start.

If you can offer suggestions on how to do a comparison of the list of /downloads/MICROSIP-x.xx.xx.zip I'd appreciate it.

I suggest scraping the source file list instead. https://www.microsip.org/source

From that take the highest version and download the zip version based on the version number.

I would also send the programmer(s) an email and ask if he/she has another way to determine what the latest version is. Perhaps without scraping html. Maybe there is a list of versions or files somewhere that is maintained.

Yeah that source page looks like a better place to do it. Same basic code will work with a few changes. Scraping HTML sucks but if that's what ya gotta do... until you find a better option it should work fine. Perhaps the sources page will be more reliable.

@dashrender said in script to download and extract MicroSip portable:

I've been wanting a way to download the latest version of MicroSip portable.

$Save_Path = 'C:\ESD\'
$Expand_Path = 'C:\ESD\expand\'
$Web_URI = 'https://microsip.org/downloads'
$Web_URI_Root = 'https://microsip.org'
$DL_list = (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $Web_URI -Method GET)
$Link = $DL_list.Links | Where-Object {$_.outerText -eq 'portable'} | Select-Object href -First 1
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri ($Web_URI_Root + $Link.href) -OutFile ($Save_Path + (Split-Path $Link.href -Leaf) )
Expand-Archive ($Save_Path + (Split-Path $Link.href -Leaf)) -DestinationPath $Expand_Path

I realize this doesn't ensure I'm getting the latest version of MicroSip - I'm relying on the lastest being the first listed item that's a portable version, but it's a start.

If you can offer suggestions on how to do a comparison of the list of /downloads/MICROSIP-x.xx.xx.zip I'd appreciate it.

I didn't feel like getting into any regex atm, and wanted to keep it as close as I could to what you already have and work with that. Here's the end result I came up with that takes all the version numbers, sorts them, then finds the link matching the latest version, and downloads using that link. I also filtered for links that do not cointain "Lite", but you can change the notmatch to a match if Lite was the one you wanted. ( I assumed you were not interested in the Lite versions )

$Save_Path = 'C:\ESD\'
$Expand_Path = 'C:\ESD\expand\'
$Web_URI = 'https://microsip.org/downloads'
$Web_URI_Root = 'https://microsip.org'
$DL_list = (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $Web_URI -Method GET)

$Link = $DL_list.Links | Where-Object {$_.outerText -eq 'portable' -and $_.href -notmatch "Lite"} | Select-Object -Property href

$zipVer = foreach ($zip in $Link) {
    [version](($zip -split '-') -split '.zip')[1]
}

$latestVer = [string]($zipVer | Sort-Object -Descending | Select-Object -First 1)

$latestLink = $Link | Where-Object {$_ -match $latestVer}

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri ($Web_URI_Root + $latestLink.href) -OutFile ($Save_Path + (Split-Path $Link.href -Leaf))

Expand-Archive ($Save_Path + (Split-Path $Link.href -Leaf)) -DestinationPath $Expand_Path

A hardened system doesn't use ADDS and Windows.

@pmoncho said in Powershell split and sort date/time:

@obsolesce said in Powershell split and sort date/time:

@pmoncho said in Powershell split and sort date/time:

@pmoncho

Small update - Changed code as I realized I had to build an additional array outside the foreach loop.

$taskserver = "RemoteSystem"
$tNames = "*Location*"

$taskList = (Get-ScheduledTask -CimSession $taskserver -TaskName $tNames)

$_taskListing = foreach ($task in $taskList){

        $tName = $task.TaskName
        $tNameXML = ($tName+".xml")
        $tPath = $task.TaskPath

        Get-ScheduledTaskInfo -CimSession $taskserver -TaskPath $tPath -TaskName $tName | Select-Object TaskName, NextRunTime
}
#check to see the array is sorting at least by TaskName
$_taskListing | Sort TaskName -Descending

on the last line, have you tried sorting by the next run time?

$_taskListing | Sort NextRunTime

I just got back here and yes, I did that and it does sort it correctly. I forgot I had it sorted by TaskName, changed it and it worked fine (after setting it as an array).

I would still like to figure out how to separate the Date and Time though. That way I can use the most recent start time and add 1 minute to it for the new task that will be created.

So, while I have the sort fixed, how the heck do I split it?

My quick example output:

PS C:\Windows\system32> $_taskListing

TaskName                                      NextRunTime           
--------                                      -----------           
MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTaskMachineCore            10/13/2021 8:09:09 PM 
MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTaskMachineUA              10/13/2021 12:39:39 PM
Microsoft Compatibility Appraiser             10/14/2021 3:14:14 AM 
Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticDataCollector                       
Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticResolver

If you get the type of one of the objects your script is outputting:

($_taskListing.NextRunTime)[0].getType()

The result is:

PS C:\Windows\system32> ($_taskListing.NextRunTime)[0].getType()

IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType                                                                                                                                                               
-------- -------- ----                                     --------                                                                                                                                                               
True     True     DateTime                                 System.ValueType

Because it's a DateTime object, it's easy to manipulate.

You can easily add one minute to it using one of the built in methods:

($_taskListing.NextRunTime)[0].AddMinutes(1)

PS C:\Windows\system32> ($_taskListing.NextRunTime)[0].AddMinutes(1)

Wednesday, October 13, 2021 8:10:09 PM

You can do this part how it works best with your workflow.

@pmoncho said in Powershell split and sort date/time:

@pmoncho

Small update - Changed code as I realized I had to build an additional array outside the foreach loop.

$taskserver = "RemoteSystem"
$tNames = "*Location*"

$taskList = (Get-ScheduledTask -CimSession $taskserver -TaskName $tNames)

$_taskListing = foreach ($task in $taskList){

        $tName = $task.TaskName
        $tNameXML = ($tName+".xml")
        $tPath = $task.TaskPath

        Get-ScheduledTaskInfo -CimSession $taskserver -TaskPath $tPath -TaskName $tName | Select-Object TaskName, NextRunTime
}
#check to see the array is sorting at least by TaskName
$_taskListing | Sort TaskName -Descending

on the last line, have you tried sorting by the next run time?

$_taskListing | Sort NextRunTime

@jclambert said in What are your Thoughts on Using LAPS to manage local admin account passwords on a domain?:

The basic premise of helping to stop horizontal attacks is wonderful

But the device is joined to an AD domain so horizontal attacks are allowed by default.

@eleceng said in What are your Thoughts on Using LAPS to manage local admin account passwords on a domain?:

What are your thoughts on Using LAPS to manage local admin account passwords on a domain?

Are these local admin accounts on servers or user devices?

@eleceng said in Local Administrator Accounts Security:

should we disable the administrator account and create a different named local account with admin privileges instead

@eleceng said in Local Administrator Accounts Security:

Are we gaining a lot of security by doing this?

Not likely, the fact the VM is joined to an on-prem AD domain means that it's very likely you've technically already lost any and all security to the device/VM.

The only gain here is that you're preventing some random person who's trying to authenticate to the system as a the local Administrator from automatically knowing which username to log in with at that moment. But that is such a small aspect to the actual security of the system you can basically say that no, you are not technically gaining any security by doing that.

It's still not even close to being a concise article. The only real metric there being discussed is simply age?

Maybe the SSDs moved 100x the data in their much shorter age so far? That would mean a lot and change the outcome significantly.