windows

CODE Keyboard

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“You spent $150 on a keyboard?” – My wife There are two kinds of people in technology: those with an opinion about their keyboard, and everybody else. I happen to be one of the first. I grew up using the IBM Model F and M keyboards. They have a spring in the key switches that buckles as you press down. That gives you two things: a prominent clicking sound from the keypress, and solid tactile feedback from the key. You definitely know when that key switch actuated. Years ago I had to give up my Model M keyboards. They’re built to last but it was getting harder to find working ones, it was getting inconvenient to adapt them to USB …

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Fixing X11 Forwarding Over SSH and with Sudo

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X11 forwarding over SSH not working? Not setting $DISPLAY correctly in your shell? Having problems with X11 and sudo? Yeah, me too. Total pain in the duff. Here’s what I do to fix it. I’m thinking about Linux when I write stuff like this but a lot of this has worked on AIX and Solaris, too. Make sure your SSH client supports X11 Forwarding and that it’s turned on. I use SecureCRT but I know it works in PuTTY as well. Once you turn it on in your client & save the settings you will need to reconnect, the forwarding is established with the connection. Ensure xauth and xterm are installed. You need xauth for this to work, and xterm …

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Fixing Veeam Backup & Replication Proxy Install Errors

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Every once in a while I struggle a little to add a new Veeam Backup & Replication hot-add proxy. If you’re like me and seeing proxy install errors maybe some of these will fix you up. This is what worked for me on Windows Server 2016 when I was getting error 0x00000057, “Failed to create persistent connection to ADMIN$” and some other unhelpful messages. If you’re using a hardened Windows installation all bets are off, since the goal of hardening is to intentionally disrupt remote access. I’d get it running with as close to a stock Windows installation as possible and then work from there if you need to secure things further. There are also ways to manually install the Veeam …

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How to Troubleshoot Unreliable or Malfunctioning Hardware

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My post on Intel X710 NICs being awful has triggered a lot of emotion and commentary from my readers. One of the common questions has been: so I have X710 NICs, what do I do? How do I troubleshoot hardware that isn’t working right? 1. Document how to reproduce the problem and its severity. Is it a management annoyance or does it cause outages & downtime? Is there a reasonable expectation that what you’re trying to do should work the way you expect? That might seem like an odd question, but sometimes other people do the procurement for (and without) us and there are gotchas they didn’t think to ask about. In my case with the X710s I felt I …

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Intel X710 NICs Are Crap

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(I’m grumpy this week and I’m giving myself permission to return to my blogging roots and complain about stuff. Deal with it.) In the not so distant past we were growing a VMware cluster and ordered 17 new blade servers with X710 NICs. Bad idea. X710 NICs suck, as it turns out. Those NICs do all sorts of offloads, and the onboard processor intercepts things like CDP and LLDP packets so that the OS cannot see or participate. That’s a real problem for ESXi hosts where you want to listen for and broadcast meaningful neighbor advertisements. Under Linux you can echo a bunch of crap into the right spot in /dev and shut that off but no such luck on …

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How to Disable Windows IPv6 Temporary Addresses

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The default Microsoft Windows IPv6 implementation has privacy extensions enabled, where IPv6 temporary addresses are used for client activities. The idea is that IPv6 has so many addresses available to it that we can create extra ones to help mask our activities. In practice these temporary addresses are largely pointless, and are very unhelpful if firewalls and ACLs are configured to allow access from a specific static address. By themselves, IP addresses aren’t a good way to authenticate people but they often form another layer of defense. This is especially important for IT infrastructure where there often aren’t (or can’t be) sophisticated authentication mechanisms. Paste these commands into an administrator-level PowerShell or Command Prompt and then restart your PC: netsh interface …

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Should We Panic About the KPTI/KAISER Intel CPU Design Flaw?

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As a followup to yesterday’s post, I’ve been asked: should we panic about the KPTI/KAISER/F*CKWIT Intel CPU design flaw? My answer was: it depends on a lot of unknowns. There are NDAs around a lot of the fixes so it’s hard to know the scope and effect. We also don’t know how much this will affect particular workloads. The folks over at Sophos have a nice writeup today about the actual problem (link below) but in short, the fix will reduce the effectiveness of the CPU’s speculative execution and on-die caches, forcing it to go out to main memory more. Main memory (what we call RAM) is 20x slower than the CPU’s L2 cache (look below for a good link showing …

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Intel CPU Design Flaw, Performance Degradation, Security Updates

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I was just taking a break and reading some tech news and I saw a wonderfully detailed post from El Reg (link below) about an Intel CPU design flaw and impending crisis-level security updates to fix it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the fix for the problem is estimated to decrease performance by 5% to 30%, with older systems being the hardest hit. Welcome to 2018, folks. In short, an Intel CPU tries to keep itself busy by speculating about what it’s going to need to work on next. On Intel CPUs (but not AMD) this speculative execution doesn’t properly respect the security boundaries between the OS kernel and userspace applications, so you can trick an Intel processor into letting …

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Calibrate Your Monitor

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When I build a new computer one of the things I do as part of the setup is calibrate the color of the monitors. It’s actually pretty amazing how much better things look after just a few minutes of adjustments. It’s also nice to have the monitors synchronized, so if I move a window between them it doesn’t change color. I use Microsoft Windows 10 (1703 as of this writing) on all my desktops now, and here’s my process. Apple appears to have a similar calibration tool built in to MacOS, and all my Linux boxes are headless, so you are on your own. Sorry. 1. Reset the monitor(s) to factory settings. On my Dell LCD panels there’s a “Reset …

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Fix WinRM Client Issues

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My team manages a lot of Dell hardware. Over the years we’ve run into situations where we have to replace the system board on a host. The system board’s management interface, iDRAC, has a license key on it, and when you replace the system board it’s helpful if you can export the license key ahead of time. That way you can reimport it again easily without getting your sales team involved to reissue a key. Unfortunately sometimes that’s not possible, such as when the iDRAC management interface is what died (my case today). Turns out that Dell has the “Dell EMC License Manager” (get it from support.dell.com under the Systems Management downloads for your hardware) which you can proactively take …

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