For those looking to ensure that their vSphere environments are DISA-compliant, VMware has created a pretty nice repo of tools which help address the nearly 500(!) compliance checks. The solution is a mixed bag of ansible and PowerShell for remediation and Chef inspec for evaluation. I never worked with inspec so I …

Recently, while exploring Chef's platform for "Compliance as Code" called InSpec, I ran into an issue when executing VMware's DISA STIG profile against a VMware host. Sorry, we are unable to detect your platform Train::PlatformDetectionFailed After connecting to my test vCenter server, I quickly realized …

NOTE: If you're not yet using Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, please follow this article instead. The recent OS X High Sierra iamroot vulnerability reminded me just how many people don't secure their remote desktop connections. While Windows Remote Desktop is more secure than VNC, neither RDP, ADP nor VNC should be …

NOTE: If you're using Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, please follow this article instead. The recent OS X High Sierra iamroot vulnerability reminded me just how many people don't secure their remote desktop connections. While Windows Remote Desktop is more secure than VNC, neither RDP, ADP nor VNC should be directly …

SSPI handshake failed with error code 0x80090311, state 14 while establishing a connection with integrated security; the connection has been closed. Reason: AcceptSecurityContext failed. The Windows error code indicates the cause of failure. No authority could be contacted for authentication. Login failed. The login is …

Recently, I wrote about Joining Ubuntu to an Active Directory Domain. That was for an actual Ubuntu box and the plan was that the next post would be about adding Apache to the mix. But then I got distracted by Apache on Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (check out my gists for sneak peaks). I should be practicing for my …

Back in 2009, I did a whole lot of messing around with Linux and Active Directory integration, primarily for Apache. Now that Linux is coming to Windows, I figured I'd brush up on my Linux and Windows Integrated Authentication skills to work with Ubuntu, too. Clients and Servers Since 2009, it seems that a couple …

It's obvious that I love PowerShell and SQL Server. Together, they allow SQL Server DBA's to solve just about any problem. Most of my projects have come from questions posted in Reddit's SQL Server subreddit, including my most recent project, Reset-SqlSaPassword, which allows you to regain syadmin access to your SQL …

Back in 2013, I wrote a blog post about setting up RD Gateway in Windows 2012 using an AD domain certificate. This post is directed to Windows 2012 R2. There isn't much difference, but in this tutorial, I'll demonstrate how to setup RD Gateway with a globally recognized SSL certificate. Like my previous post about …

So here's what's awesome about Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol SSL VPNs: they give your connecting client an IP and make it a full-on part of the network. And this is all done over port 443, a commonly used port which is often enabled on firewalls. SSTP SSL VPNs are not like some fake "SSL VPNs" that just …