Pat Spencer

Wireless device monitoring with wavemon wavemon is a wireless device monitoring software that allows you to watch signal and noise levels, packet statistics, device configuration, and network parameters of your wireless network hardware. It was written by Jan Morgenstern and is regularly maintained. It allows you to display your WiFi signal strength in realtime. Installation and start You install wavemon with sudo apt install wavemon -y And start it with wavemon and a dashboard appears. If you can’t see the function keys at the bottom, you need to make your Terminal window larger. What the information means Let’s quickly run through the data points that you want to look at to understand better the WiFi quality that your digital picture frame enjoys. Signal strength Basically, the higher the signal strength, the more reliable the connection and higher speeds are possible. The signal strength is specified as -dBm (decibels related to one ...

  If you have a link to a YouTube video such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaeDtNw32EA There a couple of tricks that you can use to play this video without advertising.  1) - Modify the above URL to add a "hyphen" between the T and U to make it as follows: https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=YaeDtNw32EA This will throw you to an alternate YouTube,com URL as follows: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YaeDtNw32EA 2) - Edit the original UTL to the above URL as shown.  Specifically, do a search and replace on " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" and replace with " https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/" Note: These work as of 01/07/2023.

What I didn't learn in school about History. Interesting videos about the fall of intellectual advancement in early 1100 AD. Neil Degrasse Tyson on the collapse of intellectual advancement in Bagdad around 1100 AD.   https://youtu.be/GApFIt-fG6c The Golden age of Islam Explained.  https://youtu.be/tJJLvoDg2_E 1177 B.C When Civilization Collapsed https://youtu.be/M4LRHJlijVU

Our local Amateur Radio club is building a Radio Direction Finding TDOA (Time Difference of Arrival) detector that has LED's to indicate the direction (Left or right) of the fox.  Here are the build instructions.   (Note: this project was originally presented by NZ1J.  See his video:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNqUKYkifOo&t=68s   ) Here is the completed project: We start with the schematic:   Note that you either install PIN Diode pairs s D3 and D2, or Diodes pair D1 and D4.   The difference between these is the packaging.  If you are ok with Surface mount, then install D1/D4.  If you want discrete components use D3/D2. Next is the PCB.   The PCB can be ordered using the GRBR files available from the author.  The BOM for the electronic parts is as such: Doppler Direction Finder Bill of Materials   11/12/2021        Qty Part Digi-key Part Numbe...

This article describes a few projects that I built from plans for Amateur Radio Fox Hunting. Basically, the hobby/sport is for someone to hide a few low power "Foxes", which are small transmitters that beep or send Morse Code, and then have a bunch of HAM's try to find them. The first project that I built was a Yagi Antenna (Directional receiver) and a 4MHZ Offset Attenuator.  The attenuator is needed when you get close to the fox and you need to reduce the power of the received signal.  I struggled with this setup because, on my first 2 fox hunts, there was too much reflection and multi-path interference.  This causes false direction detection and if you are not mentally prepared for this, you want to throw all of your equipment into a garbage can and take up a different hobby.   There are some truly strange individuals who find this frustration fun and enjoy making other people suffer, but I will leave that discussion for another day.  Anyw...

I purchased a new BoXZY (3D printer, laser and CNC Mill) and have been pretty pleased so far. See https://boxzy.com/ One little issue though is that I have been trying to configure it so that I can 3D print from my laptop without having to connect a USB cable to the printer. The layout in my office is not convenient for the cable to span across the room.  Also, when I start using it for CNC Milling, I do not want to necessarily have my laptop too close to the router making all the dust.  My first attempts to install Repetier Server on various platforms was less than successful. I found that I often would get the error message "Exception during socket read:Too many items in the combo box" when I connected the application to whatever server that I configured. What confused me is that it would work perfectly on one of several computers,. but I could not find a root cause. In addition, I received a Smart Controller (Beta) from BoXZY which came with Windows 10 H...

Below is my quick command that requires no customization to run on any installation: Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup |%{ .\CollectOverMetrics.ps1 -DatabaseAvailabilityGroup "$($_.name)" -StartTime ((get-date).AddDays(-365)) -EndTime ((get-date)) -MergeCSVFiles} Note that this script is located in the "Scripts" directory of your Exchange v15 installation. 

I have been working on a few Raspberry PI projects and seem to be a consistently drawn to an ADS-B project. The context is that I was planning a Flight Data Recorder (GPS, Gyro, and G-meter) for recording an Aerobatic flight, and find that there are several initiatives that use very similar components to build an ADS-B device. My thoughts are that the Data logging and the ADS-B projects could be combined to create a "black box" recorder that could used for 3 target markets: ADS-B out as per the original project. Data Logging for Aerobatic flight analysis as well as Schools and shared planes. "Black Box" information in the event of an accident or crash.   The projects of interest are: FlightAware ADS-B ground station https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build/CA EAA ADS-B ground station https://www.eaa.org/en/eaa/aviation-communities-and-interests/homebuilt-aircraft-and-homebuilt-aircraft-kits/resources-for-while-youre-building/building-articles/instruments-...

I stumbled on this gem today. Basically, if you use Security Filtering on a User GPO, it may not work any more due to Microsoft Patch  MS 16-072 , which was released on June 14, 2016. See https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askpfeplat/2016/07/05/who-broke-my-user-gpos/ This is an excellent article and explains it very well. Basically, this Microsoft patch changes the way that GPO's are processed. In summary: After applying the appropriate patch to your systems, User group policies are retrieved from SYSVOL differently than before. Prior to the update, domain joined computers used the user’s security context to make the connection and retrieve the policies. After the update is applied, domain joined computers will now retrieve all policies using the computer security context. What this means is that if you have used Security Filtering on a GPO with User scope, and you do not have "Authenticated Users" in the list of delegates with Read permissions, you need to add "...

Use Splatting, Proxy, and Metadata in Powershell Splatting is the ability to use a dictionary or a list to supply parameters to a command. Example: $MailMessage = @{     To = “me@mycompany.com ”     From = “me@mycompany.com ”     Subject = “Hi”     Body = “Hello”     Smtpserver = “smtphost”     ErrorAction = “SilentlyContinue” } Send-MailMessage @MailMessage Proxy commands are wrappers of existing commands in Windows PowerShell, and to make this possible, a number of different things had to be enabled in the language that can have interesting other uses. Metadata provides information about the command and parameters of different commands, and provides a structure that you can use to “write” a command without typing out the whole script. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2010/10/18/use-splatting-to-simplify-your-powershell-scripts/

As part of securing access to Active Directory, and following the Least Privileges Principle, it has been a goal of mine to be able to run all Administrative Tasks on a Management workstation while only logging in to the workstation using a generic, minimum Privileges user account. While most management consoles can be launched in a "RUNAS" mode, it has been an Achilles Heel that it has always been thought that you could not run Windows Explorer in a RUNAS.   This prevents you from doing File System Permission management. Well, my genius friend (who is an absolute wizard at Google Searches) has found an answer. Follow the step below to do it.  Start the Registry Editor as an Administrative User. Navigate to, take ownership of, and grant yourself Full Control permission to the key  HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID\{CDCBCFCA-3CDC-436f-A4E2-0E02075250C2} (This is "Elevated-Unelevated Explorer Factory") Rename the value  RunAs  to  _RunAs . Close Regedit. run...

I am sure that everyone who administrates AD runs into this problem at some point. Here is an article that thoroughly lays it all out. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/22461.understanding-the-ad-account-attributes-lastlogon-lastlogontimestamp-and-lastlogondate.aspx The summary of this article is, that if you want to find out the TRUE last logon activity for a user, it is best to use the command Search-ADAccount -AccountInactive -DateTime ((get-date).adddays(-90)) -UsersOnly If you are ONLY interested in dates that are more than 14 days ago, then you can safely use the "LASTLOGONDATE" attribute.   Less than 14 days of viewing and you cannot rust this attribute.  You must get fancy and query all of the DC's individually. 

I found this article quite helpful.  It contains some excellent detailed information. https://redmondmag.com/articles/2009/07/01/6-tips-for-troubleshooting-active-directory.aspx Especially detailed is the AD Diagnostics Registry settings:

Fix Trust Relationship if a simple Computer password reset is required http://blog.blksthl.com/2013/03/18/fix-the-trust-relationship-between-this-workstation-and-the-primary-domain-failed/ This is dead simple, but if you were not aware, you do not necessarily need to rejoin the domain if the trust relationship is broken with AD.  Just resetting the password is all . Steps using Powershell: Login locally to the server Run the PowerShell command: Reset-ComputerMachinePassword -Server -Credential Restart-Computer

There are lots of great blogs out there on how to do the overall migration of Public folders from previous versions of Exchange to 2013, but few of them detailed how to deal with a few choice issues that I encountered in a recent migration that I performed. For a good, detailed, checklist of how to do the migration, see any of the following:     http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2010-2013-migration-moving-public-folders/     http://blogs.technet.com/b/meamcs/archive/2013/07/25/part-4-step-by-step-exchange-2007-to-2013-migration.aspx     http://www.msexchange.org/articles-tutorials/exchange-server-2013/migration-deployment/migrating-public-folders-exchange-2013-part1.html My migration was for 50,000 folders, and about 130GB of data. The issues that I ran into were (but not limited to):     Needing a System Attendant mailbox on each server hosting Public Folders     Spaces at the end of the names of fold...

Found this great article. http://blog.scosby.com/post/2012/12/13/Disabling-Windows-Server-2012-Lock-Screen-Timeout.aspx Disabling the Windows Server 2012 Lock Screen Timeout In Server 2012 by default, the lock screen will put the monitors to sleep after 1 minute. I found myself waking the monitors too frequently. An initial web search led me to a MSDN forum post for Windows 8 that unlocked a missing Power Settings feature in Server 2012.   1.        Open the following registry key      a.        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99\8EC4B3A5-6868-48c2-BE75-4F3044BE88A7     2.        Set the following value      a.        Attributes => 2   3.        Now open Control Panel>Power Options>Change Plan Settings...

This is a quick and dirty but works. Here is a simple script to export and then import the OU structure from one AD to another, such as when you want to create a lab from a production AD. To export the Prod OU's to a CSV, enter the following command:  Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -Filter *|select name,@{n="Path";E={($_.DistinguishedName).replace("OU="+$_.name+",","") }} | ConvertTo-Csv -NoTypeInformation |out-file -FilePath Prod-OUS-4-Import.csv Next,  edit the domain name in the CSV to change it to the new domain. Also, clean up the file to remove any OU's that are out of scope.  Third, run the following script using the CSV to import the names and Path of the OU's # Command Line Parameters Param(  [Parameter(Mandatory=$false,HelpMessage='CSV FIle')][string]$Inputfile=".\Prod-OUS-4-Import.csv" ) import-module activedirectory # Read in data $OUS = import-csv $InputFile $ous |ft -a  #validate data on screen # get current ...

I was recently asked to evaluate an Active Directory environment to determine it's health, specifically relating to GPO's and how they were being used. I discovered that the number and configuration of the OU's, GPO's, and contents, were a clear indication that the administration of GPO's was not well understood by the committee of people who were managing them, and that there were clearly problems being self-inflicted due to these issues. The question, however, was how can we quickly assess whether the management of GPO's was in trouble, and also how can we quantify the issue? The first thing to understand is that there are Recommended Best Practices from Microsoft for how to manage GPO's.  See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785903(v=ws.10).aspx But how to quantify these subjective suggestions? First,  "Minimize the Use of the Block Policy Inheritance Feature".   You can determine the number of OU's that have Blocked Policy Inhe...

I have been working for a little while on creating tools for an administrator to be able to manage an Active Directory for Least Privileges Principles, and to secure AD Access. Specifically here, I will be talking about configuring Monitoring and Alerts for suspicious behavior in the administration of Active Directory. The first activity to monitor and to generate an alert is a logon by a member of the Microsoft Privileged Groups.  It is assumed that you have read and are following the Microsoft Best Practice of normally having ZERO members of the Privileged Groups (Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, etc).  Membership in these groups is only granted temporarily in order to perform a specific task.   The Intruder Attack Surface of your Ad is minimized by reducing the time that this elevation of privileges exist. But what about abuse of privilege, or unauthorized role elevation? By monitoring and alerting on every logon and logoff on any computer of anyone with this group me...

Securing AD with Least Privilege Principle I have been working for the last number of weeks on a project to secure AD, and to reduce the Attack Surface of AD. If you are not on board with why you need to secure AD from compromise, and to establish good security work habits, please view one or more of the following videos.  These show how incredibly easy it is for a hacker to break in to your systems. From Microsoft Ignite 2015. How You Can Hack-Proof Your Clients and Servers in a Day https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2346 This is an excellent technical article with hands-on demo of tools, password decodes, remote code execution, enable webcam, etc. . Detecting the Undetectable https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2344 . Next step is to review and become familiar with Microsoft's Best Practices for Securing AD. http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=38785 Some of the key components of these documents and video's are: Set...