I recently deployed AWS GuardDuty for a client and wanted to share some thoughts on the services at a high level. If unfamiliar, GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior by evaluating VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail and DNS Logs (if using AWS DNS). The Good A single click … Continue reading Thoughts on AWS GuardDuty
Creating Local Accounts in Powershell
Ok, creating a user account with Powershell- what's interesting about this? Well, let's take a look: It's noteworthy to point-out that you need to convert the password to a secure string. Otherwise, you'll end up with a error like this: A secure string is required for a password creation. If you're creating the account interactively, … Continue reading Creating Local Accounts in Powershell
PS One-Liner: Pull Dell Service Tag
Every now and then, I'll need to pull the Service Tag from a Dell system that I'm working on remotely. From cmd line this can be done with: wmic bios get serialnumber However, if you want to do something with the output, Powershell is a bit better: If you're wanting to only return the value … Continue reading PS One-Liner: Pull Dell Service Tag
Adding Alternate Computer Names to Windows Servers
Let's say you're doing a file server migration from one server to another and users have a bunch of desktop shortcuts mapped by UNC path. Perhaps this server holds files for a client application that has a bunch of UNC paths mapped within it. It's a real pain to hunt for each shortcut and edit … Continue reading Adding Alternate Computer Names to Windows Servers
Basic Linux Discovery (mostly Ubuntu)
My background is in the Windows ecosystem. But occasionally (and increasingly) I am needing to do things here are there with Linux. So, I've started to make some efforts to develop practical knowledge beyond just occasionally just dabbling. Let's say we've a a server dropped in our lap and need to assess what it does … Continue reading Basic Linux Discovery (mostly Ubuntu)
Finding Long File Paths with Powershell
If you've done many Windows file server migrations, you've certainly come across a long file path issue. There are a number of ways to address it. For me, it's preferable to know where the files are ahead of time rather than just stumble upon failures when running copies. Thankfully, Powershell can help us locate the … Continue reading Finding Long File Paths with Powershell
A Quick and Dirty Method for Auditing Permissions by Keyword with Powershell
Auditing NTFS permissions in Windows is not a fun task, especially in environments that may have a lot of broken inheritance deeper in the file structure. In such scenarios, Powershell can be a powerful tool to help spot check permissions, given certain keywords. The script below would be run from the Windows Server sharing the … Continue reading A Quick and Dirty Method for Auditing Permissions by Keyword with Powershell
