Category Archives: Administration

ASR rule “Block Win32 API calls from Office macros”

Posted on 2023-01-19 by Oliver

Microsoft says it’s fixed. It may be, but I think there’s more to it than meets the eye. Colleagues of mine noticed that, aside from shortcuts disappearing, Defender also started acting up on TortoiseProc.exe from TortoiseSVN. Notably, checkouts would fail … Continue reading →

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PowerShell

Posted on 2022-10-12 by Oliver

Within the last two years or so I have started to use more and more PowerShell scripting at work and for my private administration tasks on Windows. The thing I find coolest about PowerShell is that you can tap into … Continue reading →

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Transition

Posted on 2021-11-23 by Oliver

After more than 17 years — it all started in April 2004 — I am no longer hosting the UltraVNC forum. To the users the only very visible recent change may have been that forum.ultravnc.net now forwards to forum.uvnc.com. The … Continue reading →

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Remove all those pesky (Metro) apps from Windows 10

Posted on 2019-08-26 by Oliver

If, like I, you are sure you won’t need those pesky apps, use the following PowerShell pipeline to get rid of the provisioned packages: Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online|Out-GridView -PassThru|Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -ErrorAction Continue -Online … to also remove those apps that are marked removable, … Continue reading →

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Windows 10 forced update sucks

Posted on 2018-02-12 by Oliver

I have written about Windows 10 before. Also about Windows 8.1, which is the predecessor in (diabolic) spirit. I was never impressed by Windows 10 and I guess it’s not going to change. Sure, Windows 10 has a very stable … Continue reading →

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Performance hog extraordinaire …

Posted on 2018-01-23 by Oliver

So as of recently I started having issues with memory use. My machine has 32 GiB of physical RAM, so there shouldn’t usually be a problem running even several virtual machines at once. I’ve even run an XP VM from … Continue reading →

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SSH reverse tunnel

Posted on 2017-02-23 by Oliver

With autossh you can establish an SSH reverse tunnel from a given system, provided it can reach some other machine via SSH outside its own network. You can also do that with ssh alone, but autossh comes with added features … Continue reading →

Posted in Administration, EN, Linux, Software, Unix and unixoid | 2 Comments

Vorläufiges Fazit zu RootNerds

Posted on 2016-01-19 by Oliver

Der aktuelle Stand ist, daß man die VPS komplett neu aufgesetzt hat. Alle Daten sind – zumindest vorläufig – scheinbar weg. Interessant, daß man bei der IAMONSYS GmbH meint daß bei einem Problem welches so kraß ist und sich seit … Continue reading →

Posted in Administration, DE, Gedanken, Meinung | Tagged | 1 Comment

Frust mit RootNerds.com

Posted on 2016-01-19 by Oliver

Also, ich hab außer den Servern bei Hetzner auch noch einen VPS1 bei RootNerds.com. Nachdem wir ca. 19:00 gestern wieder hier ankamen, fiel mir auf, daß der VPS nicht reagierte. Nun ist es so, daß ich diesen Server für bestimmte … Continue reading →

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Signing an RPM unattended …

Posted on 2013-09-04 by Oliver

It appears that there is no way to sign an RPM package unattended with the default tools. However, expect comes to the rescue. I found two descriptions on other blogs how to do it: from 2008 here: GPG signing RPMs … Continue reading →

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Cheeky and stupid bot …

Posted on 2013-02-28 by Oliver

The bot with user agent Linguee Bot (http://www.linguee.com/bot; bot@linguee.com) just downloaded approximately 2 GiB of stuff from a ViewVC-listing on one of my servers. Just because it’s stupid, but also because it’s so cheeky to ignore robots.txt. So be it. … Continue reading →

Posted in Administration, EN, Linux, Opinion, Software, Unix and unixoid | Tagged | 1 Comment

How to get English error messages on a localized Ubuntu?

Posted on 2013-02-19 by Oliver

Have you ever noticed that oftentimes people in anglophone forums will almost be offended if someone quotes an error message in their local language? Well, on one hand I can understand it, on the other I see more value in … Continue reading →

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A shout to VMware …

Posted on 2012-12-19 by Oliver

Since I don’t have a support contract, perhaps you would be so kind to tell your setup authoring folks to not remove the last resort for anyone who tries to install the vSphere client 5.0? Thank you in advance, very … Continue reading →

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First impression of Windows Server 2012

Posted on 2012-12-10 by Oliver

*facepalm* // Oliver PS: does MS think that making it look like a 2D game and forcing everyone to click tiles instead of using the keyboard to navigate the startmenu makes an admin more productive? 😕

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SSL error with a newly signed cert?

Posted on 2012-09-20 by Oliver

Last night I literally spent hours figuring out an alleged issue with the certificate from StartCom. Of course the problem was entirely on my end, in the editor to be precise. But what happened? I fetched ca-bundle.pem and entered it … Continue reading →

Posted in Administration, EN, IT Security, Linux, Software | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Highly useful: ddrutility

Posted on 2012-09-10 by Oliver

During a rescue mission I encountered read errors on both hard drives of a degraded RAID. Since most commercial end-user tools limit your flexibility I went for Ubuntu Rescue Remix 12.04 in order to use ddrescue. However, to my delight … Continue reading →

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Symbolic links to remote locations …

Posted on 2012-05-24 by Oliver

Recently after migrating to Windows 7 on my work machine, I ran into a little issue. I created symbolic links pointing to a network share. Now this is all fine and dandy, but symbolic links can only be created by … Continue reading →

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Cool

Posted on 2012-05-13 by Oliver

COPSSH, another SSH implementation on Windows. And it even seems to be convenient to use.

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prune-kernels function …

Posted on 2012-02-22 by Oliver

If you are like me, you will have noticed on Ubuntu (and sometimes Debian) that stale old kernels remain on the disk even when they aren’t needed anymore. I wrote a little Bash function to get rid of those kernels. … Continue reading →

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by the way …

Posted on 2012-02-14 by Oliver

Convenient little snippet to get my external IP: echo $(wget -q -O – ip.assarbad.net/text)

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