A fine March Wednesday, I spun my home lab and loaded configuration into PNET labs, as I began working through a workbook, that is when I was reminded of a planned vacation that was coming up that very weekend. As I really didn’t want to shut the entire thing down; it takes ages to reboot, […]
Several times I’ve had a need to figure out which AD groups I’m part of compared to somebody else. Typically somebody whose access is broken. Most often than not, a new joiner. There are several ways an end user without any elevated privileges can find this information. To find yours in a directory environment, execute […]
This happened over a decade ago when I was a budding L1 engineer, monitoring network infrastructure of a bank. This post is recollection of a memory when my team-lead (a great mentor) at the time, put me through a challenging exercise to meet a seemingly simple customer requirement. Existing Topology We had this typical topology […]
I had a task to build a site-to-site VPN tunnel with another vendor over which a large amount of data was planned to be transacted on regular basis. On my end, the end-point was a Cisco ASA 5585-X firewall running 9.8 code. To protect the internet circuit from being over-saturated, I decided to use MQC […]
For a remote-access VPN service – to identify whether a genuine authorized corporate asset is connecting, we must check certain parameters to identify the end user machine. Best way would be to utilize digital certificates. Which is better – computer or user certificate? Machine Certificates User Certificates Uniquely identify a machine on the domain Uniquely […]
Cockroaches – they’re the most irritable pests along-side mosquitos that I could think of. Formidable Beasts At my previous apartment in Bangalore, I spent countless hours reading and learning about them – their biology, their evolution, and much more! I don’t know why? I was curious to learn about my adversary in detail so as […]
I’ve had a home lab for learning and skill development from past many years, however, COVID situation and lock downs had many of us move away from our traditional work locations, back to our native parental towns. Most of us opting for remote work. Lock down and Exodus This experience in itself compelled me to […]
I own a Dell PE R620 server running ESXi 6. Fortunately for me, it has a iDRAC7 enterprise licensed card installed that lets me remotely power on and off the server module via scripting – on click of a button. Power On This script logs into the iDRAC via SSH and switches on the server […]
Came to know through a colleague about this refreshing new platform called PNETLab. This is a much more polished cousin of EVE-NG. Having spent large part of lockdown learning with EVE-NG on GCP, this was the best thing to come across. Free lab bundles Main feature for me are the downloadable labs which contain not […]
A few of my compute nodes running on AWS were required to have their SSH port open to the public internet. There are several well established ways that can be used to protect the login. Fail2ban comes to mind, or a firewall if you know the source IP addresses or the range. In this instance, […]
