Month: December 2014

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Tech

OnePlus One Invite Giveaway

I have some OnePlus One invites to give away – I purchased two of these phones for family and they are absolutely brilliant; awesome specs for an awesome phone at a crazy cheap price.

Take a look at the OnePlus One if you haven’t heard of them – they’re a new brand and they’ve supposedly had a marketing budget of only $300. The rest is by word of mouth and the hype caused by the ‘exclusivity’ of the invite only system… and trust me, it’s worked pretty well for them so far.

Leave a comment below – first come first serve!

Also remember that the invites are only valid (as far as I am aware) for 24 hours so make sure you’ll actually use it before leaving a comment.

Please accept my apologies if you leave a comment but don’t get an invite as I only have a limited supply!

UPDATE: All invites sent! If any invites are still unclaimed by the last day I will re-send them to others.

UPDATE 2: Two invites were not claimed in the 24 hour limit so still have two to give away 🙂

UPDATE 3: All gone!

Categories
Tech

Where Are Those Group Policies?

Not so long ago I was looking at implementing BitLocker in our organisation to replace a Symantec product that was causing us lots of issues – and simply wasn’t worth the price we were paying for it (turned out to be another acquisition by Symantec that was pretty much abandoned as soon as they bought it).

I was reading articles on what BitLocker GPO settings I could apply to our machines, however every time I looked for the settings I could not find any on our domain controllers.

Continue reading “Where Are Those Group Policies?”
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Tech

Cisco IronPort E-mail Security Appliance Best Practices : Part 2

This article is a continuation from part 1 of the IronPort ‘best practices’ series.

Here I will discuss:

  • Implementing DNS blacklists
  • DLP
  • Bounce profiles
  • LDAP queries
Continue reading “Cisco IronPort E-mail Security Appliance Best Practices : Part 2”
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Tech

WDS TFTP Maximum Block Size and Variable Window Extension

This is a quick post to show the performance benefits of TFTP block sizes and Variable Window Extensions. Please note that my tests were brief and not scientific at all but the results were good enough for me! 🙂

Our WDS server is running on a 2012 R2 VM. Client connected via ethernet cable and PXE booting over UEFI.

The boot image was about 1.6GB in size and I timed the tests from the moment the image started loading to the moment the screen went black (so basically the entire image download)

Continue reading “WDS TFTP Maximum Block Size and Variable Window Extension”
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Tech

MDT, WDS and UEFI – Get Rid of Those DHCP Options

The below is some things to look in to if you are having problems deploying UEFI boot images to your machines using WDS.

I will admit that I used to use DHCP options 66 and 67 for deploying legacy, non-UEFI images not knowing that it was not best practice (the guides to deploying WDS with MDT weren’t great at the time) However it DID work perfectly for us and we had no problems what so ever when deploying these images to our Dell laptops.

Now that I have upgraded our MDT and WDS infrastructure, I am pushing out UEFI images but found that the PXE boot wasn’t working – even after changing DHCP option 67 to point to the UEFI boot file: boot\x64\wdsmgfw.efi

I did a bit of research online and found that using these DHCP options for PXE boot isn’t actually supported OR recommended by Microsoft… hmm, that’s news to me.

“When the initial DHCP offer from the DHCP server contains these boot options, an attempt is made to connect to port 4011 on the DHCP server. This offer fails if the PXE server is on another computer.
Important: Microsoft does not support the use of these options on a DHCP server to redirect PXE clients”

So apparently if DHCP and WDS is not on the same server (and they shouldn’t be unless you have a super small environment), when the DHCP server responds with options 60, 66 or 67, the client will try to connect to port 4011 on the DHCP server rather than the WDS server – which obviously won’t respond because it won’t have the WDS service running on it.

Okay so as far as I am aware (please correct me if I am wrong!) the best practice is to get rid of any of the DHCP options discussed above (60, 66 and 67) and use IP helpers instead for the purpose of PXE booting.

You may already have IP helper configured in your network so if you do, keep the existing DHCP servers in there but add another entry for the PXE server.

Obviously test in a small network/VLAN first before making these changes in production. As soon as I made these changes the client booted perfectly first time.