Deploying F5 BigIP in Microsoft Azure

This is a real pain the @r$e. Forget all your habits acquired in the happy world of VMWare or on physical BigIP boxes. Azure is nothing like this. It’s  all about limitations.

In fact all of them stem from the fact that you can have only one interface on your F5 VE box in Azure. One for everything – management, SNAT and all of your VSs.  Yes, you have heard me correctly – all these pieces have to survive on the single interface and single IP address. Arrghhh!…

Keepass time saving trick

It appeared that you can double-click on the URL field in Keepass and it will execute whatever is written there (to a degree I hope 🙂 – no thorough tests has been done).

So you can do thing like this:

Then double click in the URL field and you will get your RDP straight away.

Thanks Adam – your little time-saving automations are awesome!

How to automate a change of NetBIOS settings in properties of a network connection in Windows

NetBIOS and LLMNR protocols is a really bad legacy in Windows (from security perspective). They should be disabled in all networks where DNS is sufficient means of name resolution.

There are three options:

TCP throughput vs. Delay and Window Size

TCP throughput (bits per second) = Window Size (bits) / Latency (seconds)

Optimal TCP Window Size (bits) = Bandwidth (bits per second) * RTT latency (seconds)

Maximum RTT latency for desired throughput = Window size (bits) / Desired throughput (bits per second)

some good explanations can be found here

WMI probe to obtain a username of a person logged on a remote PC

Useful when troubleshooting UserID on Palo Alto (and, to be honest, in many other cases these days when NetBIOS is not such a common thing anymore):

wmic /node:<remotecomputer> computersystem get username

To perform this query you need to have permissions to read the CIMV2 namespace on the remote system.

Citrix XenApp – Web Interface Logon and Application Launch Process

Good 5-minute video by Citrix Support on their web login process in XenApp (link opens in the new window)

Worth watching if you have to deal with XenApp…

Windows 2008 NPS (RADIUS) configuration export/import

Export:

netsh nps export filename="c:\temp\nps.xml" exportPSK=YES

Import:

netsh nps import "c:\temp\nps.xml"

It appeared that W2K8 (at least R2) does not like anything except .xml file extension (it might like .txt as well but, say, .cfg did not work for me).

Windows DNS Resolver (dnscache) Algorithm

Fantastic article that clearly explains how DNS resolver works on Windows (in terms of failing over between DNS servers specified in TCP/IP settings)

http://blogs.technet.com/b/stdqry/archive/2011/12/15/dns-clients-and-timeouts-part-2.aspx

Password reset for Nessus (Windows)

Have you forgotten yours? Here is the solution:

1. run CMD with local admin rights
2. navigate to the Nessus folder (something like C:\Program Files\Tenable\Nessus)
3. run nessus-chpasswd [username]

Done!

(Apparently you need to know your username before you proceed with the above…)

RootKit detection tools

Here is a good collection of tools to detect various root kits:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-rootkit-scanner-remover.htm

(the link opens in new window)