I’ve Installed Nextcloud… Now What?

I’ve been woefully neglecting this blog for FAR too long. Life has been quite busy and honestly, I just haven’t made proper time for it. It’s been so long in fact, I had to archive out of date posts and I’ve not even posted once about Nextcloud. It is a shame on my part because…

openSUSE Thoughts and Recommendations

The combination of openSUSE Tumbleweed’s rolling release style, the qualtify of applications available on the Linux platform (including snaps, flatpak, and AppImage files), I feel like I have found a nice home for personal computing use – all without a single dime in license fees for my Operating System. It’s completely free, open-source, and I’m in control of the OS and my data. Fantastic!

BitLocker and Cluster Shared Volumes in Hyper-V Scenarios

In this post I’ll be focusing on configuring BitLocker on CSVs where you will be hosting Hyper-V based workloads. Just do a quick Google search. There are multiple online resources about the configuring of BitLocker and CSVs, but there is only one specific manner in which I have been able to achieve success for this…

Fortigate Firewall Debug

In one of my work environments we use Fortigate firewalls. With a complex rule-set, including multiple VDOMs, there are times where we need to figure out why some traffic (source) is not reaching its destination. We had such a case recently, and I wrote this up for documentation, sharing is caring :). I’ve changed the…

Cisco ASA to Redundant Amazon Virtual Gateways

As part of my day to day duties as a “Systems Administrator”, I configure site-to-site VPN tunnels from my company’s hosted devices, to remote endpoints of all types. The most common scenario being IPSec VPN tunnels, with the endpoints on my side being a Fortigate and Cisco ASA devices. Our team has done well over…

ArchLinux Thoughts and Installation Notes

Lately I’ve been using ArchLinux quite a bit. In fact, I use it in a VM on my Mac everyday for various tools and utilities. When you talk about or read about Archlinux online, the most common complaint and challenging aspect for most users is the initial installation process. Sure, it’s not a simple point-and-click…

Connect to L2TP VPN on Mac OSX

This weekend while setting up RRAS as part of a blog post I am working on a blog posting for Cloudservers.com, I had an issue where an L2TP VPN worked from my Windows 8 PC, but not from my Mac. The GUI error was saying that the VPN was inaccessible, and after looking further in…

SCCM 2012 SP1 CU3

Are you’re running System Center Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 and you need to now support Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 clients? Or, do you want to utilize new Server 2012 R2 machines as Configuration Manager site systems? You’ll need to download and install SCCM 2012 SP1 Cumulative Update 3. Here is an example of…