We are long time ScreenConnect (Connectwise Control) users. We use about five different SC systems, some of which we host, some we do not. So we are pretty familiar with it. We have run it on both Linux (Fedora and CentOS), and on Windows. We have all three variants running currently, in fact.

We've just started running MeshCentral 2 (currently in beta.) It is different and we like both. Wanted to provide a place to showcase some of the differences so that people could understand some pros and cons of each.

So we heard from customers of Protek Support in Salt Lake City that the MSP has been hit with ransomware that has gone on to hit all of their clients as well. From what we understand, they are currently on four days of customers being without their files and they aren't cleaning them up yet. We would suspect that their internal systems have been hit and they are tied up dealing with that.

Pretty good timing considering we just posted about this MSP Risk a few days ago.

How do MSPs survive this kind of level of destruction? Are clients talking to each other? Are clients going on to talk to other MSPs and look for assistance when their main support is gone?

We rarely think about how the MSP itself would be offline indefinitely and potentially unable to function in the case of a breach like this. But in this case, it looks like the MPS has been impacted to such a degree that they aren't even able to start helping customers yet. Four days with no action is a lifetime to an impacted business. Something like a hundred customers down for a whole week with no end in sight, it sounds like.

Each customer is going to need every machine - desktops, servers, storage, etc. to be totally wiped, reloaded, and restored. Imagine the manpower necessary to do that.

Ever need to make passwords for users and, let's face it, in the real world a lot of customers demand some pretty silly simply passwords. Using password generators often results in passwords that customers will not (and maybe cannot) use. A ridiculous situation, obviously, but it is reality. Passwords are simply difficult to often pass on to someone.

When generating temporary passwords, having something super strong is rarely very important. But avoiding something too hard to be used is needed. But just making up something non-random or even non-unique is really bad.

What's a compromise?

https://www.dinopass.com/

Yup, here is reality. Sometimes children's tools just make more sense when, well, you can draw your own conclusions.

Tested with Windows Server 2016

For whatever reason, you may end up in a situation where you need to extend the grace period for Windows RDS server (remote desktop services, aka terminal server.) This can be a pain, especially if things time out and you lose RDP access to the server. In the Windows Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2 era, Microsoft provided the following PowerShell script for this scenario. But they no longer test or maintain the script. I have tested on Windows Server 2016 and it definitely still works.

To use the script, simply save to your RDS server and run in an elevated PowerShell prompt. The script is interactive and will tell you how many days are left (very handy as you can look it up extremely quickly this way) and lets you choose if you want to reset the time or not.

## This Script is intended to be used for Querying remaining time and resetting Terminal Server (RDS) Grace Licensing Period to Default 120 Days. 
## Developed by Prakash Kumar ([email protected]) May 28th 2016 
## www.adminthing.blogspot.com 
## Disclaimer: Please test this script in your test environment before executing on any production server. 
## Author will not be responsible for any misuse/damage caused by using it. 
 
Clear-Host 
$ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue" 
 
## Display current Status of remaining days from Grace period. 
$GracePeriod = (Invoke-WmiMethod -PATH (gwmi -namespace root\cimv2\terminalservices -class win32_terminalservicesetting).__PATH -name GetGracePeriodDays).daysleft 
Write-Host -fore Green ====================================================== 
Write-Host -fore Green 'Terminal Server (RDS) grace period Days remaining are' : $GracePeriod 
Write-Host -fore Green ======================================================   
Write-Host 
$Response = Read-Host "Do you want to reset Terminal Server (RDS) Grace period to Default 120 Days ? (Y/N)" 
 
if ($Response -eq "Y") { 
## Reset Terminal Services Grace period to 120 Days 
 
$definition = @" 
using System; 
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;  
namespace Win32Api 
{ 
    public class NtDll 
    { 
        [DllImport("ntdll.dll", EntryPoint="RtlAdjustPrivilege")] 
        public static extern int RtlAdjustPrivilege(ulong Privilege, bool Enable, bool CurrentThread, ref bool Enabled); 
    } 
} 
"@  
 
Add-Type -TypeDefinition $definition -PassThru 
 
$bEnabled = $false 
 
## Enable SeTakeOwnershipPrivilege 
$res = [Win32Api.NtDll]::RtlAdjustPrivilege(9, $true, $false, [ref]$bEnabled) 
 
## Take Ownership on the Key 
$key = [Microsoft.Win32.Registry]::LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod", [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKeyPermissionCheck]::ReadWriteSubTree,[System.Security.AccessControl.RegistryRights]::takeownership) 
$acl = $key.GetAccessControl() 
$acl.SetOwner([System.Security.Principal.NTAccount]"Administrators") 
$key.SetAccessControl($acl) 
 
## Assign Full Controll permissions to Administrators on the key. 
$rule = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.RegistryAccessRule ("Administrators","FullControl","Allow") 
$acl.SetAccessRule($rule) 
$key.SetAccessControl($acl) 
 
## Finally Delete the key which resets the Grace Period counter to 120 Days. 
Remove-Item 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod' 
 
write-host 
Write-host -ForegroundColor Red 'Resetting, Please Wait....' 
Start-Sleep -Seconds 10  
 
  } 
 
Else  
    { 
Write-Host 
Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow '**You Chose not to reset Grace period of Terminal Server (RDS) Licensing' 
  } 
 
## Display Remaining Days again as final status 
tlsbln.exe 
$GracePost = (Invoke-WmiMethod -PATH (gwmi -namespace root\cimv2\terminalservices -class win32_terminalservicesetting).__PATH -name GetGracePeriodDays).daysleft 
Write-Host 
Write-Host -fore Yellow ===================================================== 
Write-Host -fore Yellow 'Terminal Server (RDS) grace period Days remaining are' : $GracePost 
Write-Host -fore Yellow ===================================================== 
 
## Cleanup of Variables 
Remove-Variable * -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

The original is kept here: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Reset-Terminal-Server-RDS-44922d91

If you want to run virt-manager from a Windows desktop, you will quickly find that no such package exists. I was distraught to find this, as having this package for Windows would be very handy. However, there is a very simple solution, virt-manager does run on Windows. And here is how to do it.

First: Install Xming

Assuming that you have chocolatey installed (and you should, if you are using Windows)...

choco install xming -y

You can find it in the Start menu to run it. It will just sit in the background.

Second: Install Ubuntu Compatibility Layer

Go to the Windows Store and get Ubuntu. Don't worry, this is the Ubuntu environment, it is not Linux is any way. This is an all-Windows solution.

Third: Install virt-manager

apt-get install virt-manager

Fourth: Set the display

export DISPLAY=:0 

Fifth: Profit!

virt-manager &

---

That's it!

@wirestyle22 said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

@CCWTech said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

@wirestyle22 said in Revisiting ZFS and FreeNAS in 2019:

This was painful to read

TRUE! Wow... some serious lack of BASIC I.T. Knowledge...

Eh, I don't really care about that. We are all in a constant state of learning. I'm not in a position to judge anyone

Lacking basic knowledge is not bad. Lacking the most basic knowledge while repeatedly berating other people and claiming to be a domain expert so cover up a long series of lies is the issue.

Maybe a special "meet and greet" session where special introductions are made or assigned first night dinner tables with newbies mixed in with old timers.

This seems to come up in nearly every conversation about programming on the IT side of the fence. Every time someone mentions Java, someone will think it is JavaScript or vice versa. This super important for anyone in IT to understand: Java and JavaScript are unrelated and totally different programming languages and under no circumstances can the names even remotely be used interchangeably.

As a general rule in IT, names of things are important and we should never casually change names, spellings or make nicknames for things without fully understanding what they mean or confusion will result. IT is not a field where casually misusing terms can work. Just because you are not intimately familiar with a specific term does not mean that using a specific term does not mean something very specific to someone else.

Java is a very large and very old programming language and platform originally from Sun and now from Oracle. It is the world's most popular programming language (with about 20% of the world programming mindshare) and has been the most or nearly the most important language for two decades. Java is object oriented, a member of the C family and famously both a language itself and a very robust language runtime platform. Java is compiled to bytecode. Typically Java is only used on servers and is by far the main language of big business. (Java has a reputation in non-programming circles for being used as a poor, cross-compatibility layer on desktops which is an unfair reputation but often the only aspect of Java seen by end users causing much confusion.)

JavaScript, also known as ECMAScript, is a younger programming language developed by Netscape and so named in the hopes of riding Java's fame to glory, which has broadly worked. JavaScript, aka JS, is famous as the language that runs in web browsers and is now officially an actual part of the HTML5 suite. JavaScript is the world's only popular prototype language rather than being object oriented. JS is currently the world's eighth post popular language with just over 2% of mindshare. JavaScript is currently gaining some notoriety for being used server-side thanks to the very new Node.js framework. To most programmers, JavaScript has been purely a means to web browser automation and nothing more. After many, many years JavaScript is starting to find new life as a general purpose language. JS is a scripting language which means that it is interpreted.

The two languages share no history, syntax, style, use cases, design choices or anything. They are truly completely unrelated languages. If someone is talking about a website or their webbrowser you can be sure they are speaking of JavaScript. If someone is talking about a desktop application, you can be sure that they are talking about Java. If someone is talking about server-side programming, you will need to pay attention and listen closely.

Don't be fooled by the inclusion of the name "Java" in the word "JavaScript", it does not imply a thing.

The Register has gotten its hands on a Raspberry Pi 2 to check it out. The new unit has quad cores, a full GB of RAM and is touted as having six times the performance of its predecessor.

Looks to be an awesome little unit and the price is still ridiculously low.

Youtube Video

OBR10

Nice thing about LVM is that everything would be identical across CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, etc. So essentially completely distro agnostic.

Gaming studio Kuato Studio's has a new game out, currently for iOS and Android via the Google Play store, called Code Warriors: Hakitzu Battles in which you write JavaScript in order to play the game and earn levels and ranks. The idea is to teach and encourage coding while using gamification to make the experience fun and rewarding. Looks extremely interesting.

@Nic said:

The only thing I've seen that makes sense is a comment on reddit saying that MITM certs like that are expected in China due to govt monitoring, so they didn't really think anything of it.

That might be the worst thing yet. This reads as "don't trust any products coming from China because they are culturally conditioned to be insecure."

Youtube Video

Bits and Bytes Episode 2

Day Two Begins

You're probably just seeing the underlying paradigm of procedural programming.

You know what we need? Webroot brand gargle or cough drops or something. That would be an awesome Virus Day give away!

Youtube Video

Bits and Bytes Episode 3

Come to the VoIP Cafe for a SIP of Coffee.

You might get this screen and nothing else when working with AetherStore 2.0 on Windows with Edge or IE browsers set as the default.

Turns out that this is just an issue with those browsers, not a problem with AetherStore. They are not redirecting properly. If you run into this, just manually go to this address in the local web browser: bridge.aetherstore.com:30723

Easy fix, but very problematic if you don't know what to do.