Category Archives: Admin

The IT Detective Agency: the case of the Is it the firewall? or routing? or switch? or layer 2?

Posted on November 21, 2019 by john | 6 views

Intro This is yet another tale of things in the IT world often do not turn out the way it seems at first blush. Or possibly a tale of just when you think you’ve seen it all after decades in … Continue reading →

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The IT Detective Agency: WebEx and the case of the mysterious reset

Posted on November 20, 2019 by john | 3 views

Intro A company known to me was a contented user of WebEx until they noticed a strange behaviour: their calls were losing quality or even dropped exactly after one hour. No one, most especially the vendor of WebEx, had the … Continue reading →

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What I’m Working on Now: building my own 3D printer

Posted on November 6, 2019 by john | 9 views

Intro Because someone else on the team had a good experience with it, and so i can exchange notes and get some tips form them, I went ahead and ordered the Anet A8 3D printer + an extra roll of … Continue reading →

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No Internet, secure WiFi status message in Windows 10

Posted on September 16, 2019 by john | 22 views

Intro Finding out how Windows decides if there is an Internet connection or not can be a challenge often posed by trying to do an Internet search comprised or words that are common and therefore used in many other contexts. … Continue reading →

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Raspberry Pi Recovery Mode or interrupting the boot process

Posted on August 26, 2019 by john | 41 views

Intro If you installed Raspbian from the NOOBS distribution as I do, then you may occasionally “blow up” your installation as I just have! You have an out, sort of, short of re-imaging the disk, though about with the same … Continue reading →

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How to test if a web site requires a client certificate

Posted on June 20, 2019 by john | 297 views

Intro I can not find a link on the Internet for this, yet I think some admins would appreciate a relatively simple test to know is this a web site which requires a client certificate to work? The errors generated … Continue reading →

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F5 clustering tips

Posted on May 1, 2019 by john | 71 views

Intro I was having trouble with one of my new F5 clusters. I thought I’d be clever and add two new F5’s to the existing cluster, and then remove the old members when everything looked good. But the device groups … Continue reading →

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Postfix Operational tips

Posted on April 3, 2019 by john | 36 views

Intro I’m trying out the system-supplied postfix on a SLES system. i had been using sendmail but there doesn’t seem to be any development on that software. Some commands I needed right away Well, right away I had thousands of … Continue reading →

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How to add private root CAs in SLES or Redhat

Posted on March 18, 2019 by john | 138 views

Intro From time-to-time I run my own PKI infrastructure, namely issuing my own certificates form my private root CA. I wanted this root CA to be recognized by Linux utilities running on Suse Linux (SLES), in particular, lftp, which I … Continue reading →

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Fishcam using Raspberry Pi and some network tricks

Posted on February 3, 2019 by john | 70 views

Intro There are more articles about running a webcam using Raspberry Pi than Carter has pills. Why bother to create another? This one is unique insofar as I created a fishcam at a school with a restricted network. None of … Continue reading →

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