Scripting Library, Information Technology

December 1, 2018December 1, 2018

Powershell & Veeam Backup and Replication / VeeamZip

First things first: this is not a sponsored article.

I came across Veeam products multiple times in my career, but most of the customers or companies that I worked for were using other products with no compelling reason for migrating from backup solutions that already worked efficiently with another one.

In the last couple of years, I’ve attended to VMWare UserCon and met some guys from Veeam, that was one of the sponsors of the event in here Melbourne (Australia). They were very approachable and kind to show that the company had a lot of new solutions to offer and one, in particular, it was too good to be true. Continue reading “Powershell & Veeam Backup and Replication / VeeamZip”

November 24, 2018December 1, 2018

Site Reliability Engineering

The moment I heard about this book, I wanted to read it. The title is self-explanatory: “How Google Runs Production Systems”. It looked so interesting to me that I immediately purchased it. At that time I had other books waiting in my bookshelf, but I was so impatient to read this one, that I admit I started immediately after the Phoenix Project. This one was the one that I absolutely wanted to read.

The contents in this book are well organised, chapter after chapter it’s easy to accept the challenges that an organisation of this size had to conquer to become successful in managing the infrastructure, processes and people.

Continue reading “Site Reliability Engineering”

November 16, 2018November 16, 2018

How to Turn On ADFS Security Auditing with Powershell

Providing the best user experience with a Single-Sign-On (SSO) capability without compromising security is key of successful implementations of federation services. I personally like the ADFS model and SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) because is robust, effective and suitable from small to large organizations offering an incredible amount of features if it configured/implemented correctly. Continue reading “How to Turn On ADFS Security Auditing with Powershell”

November 2, 2018November 5, 2018

Powershell: Monitoring AD Account Lock-Out Events

One of the most basic and repetitive tasks for system administrators is certainly unlocking Active Directory user accounts. It’s very easy to underestimate it, in fact, this operation isn’t perceived not just by users, but more importantly by junior engineers not important at all! Frequently providing some general feedback to the user on this issue or simply a response that this issue is now it’s been fixed.
On top of that, I’ve found that in some situation finding the root cause it requires a bit of investigation and experience not just to guess what more likely is causing it and not many of us are willing to take this effort. But I like to explain and document what happened to the user, to me it’s absolutely key to raise the awareness and trust people and processes involved in the IT System. Continue reading “Powershell: Monitoring AD Account Lock-Out Events”

October 23, 2018November 4, 2018

Powershell: How to perform Ping Sweep and Reverse-Lookup on a private network

There is no such thing as the myth of a “perfect” green-field deployment. But in real life most of the times there is a just room/resources (e.g. time and money) for patches of green on a big brown-field.

What I really mean.. is that we can’t always keep up with the pace of new technologies and just re-design things from ground up following new trends without understanding or maintaining the legacy design or more importantly meeting the business needs.

Starting from the network and I like to create a basic network diagram will outline at glance things that could potentially limit infrastructure growth or expose it to potential risk that we need to mitigate. Designing , re-designing things well or better is based on getting the requirements right and verify that desired targets are met. To speed up this discovery process we use tools to gather the information we need. Continue reading “Powershell: How to perform Ping Sweep and Reverse-Lookup on a private network”