Deployment tips for Active Directory Certificates Services NDES role

For those who have to setup and environment compliant with SCEP protocol into Microsoft platform, Active Directory Certificate Service has a role called NDES (Network Device Enrollment Service) that simply is the MS implementation for this standard.

I´m not going write a how to, because there are some over internet and the best one, as usual, is the Techect wiki entry that can be found here. My scenario runs on Windows Server 2012 R2.

This guide is quite good, but the product is still, in my humble opinion, in an early stage because the config is based on registry keys (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Cryptography\MSCEP) and documentation of those keys is limited.

Why do I hate Nagios?

You either love or hate Nagios, there are no intermediate opinions when you use this application. I am definitely uncomfortable with Nagios. While I'm not a radical SCOM guy, because I like other free (as in freedom) monitoring systems: Zabbix, Sensu even PandoraFMS, I really hate Nagios.
And if you want there are a lot of very good SaaS alternatives too, such as New Relic, Datadog, Monits, etc.

Nagios reminds me of the good old times, when we only had a few machines in our data centers and three or four services and they were easy to manage and monitor.  Do you remember big brother monitoring software? It was quite popular 15 years ago and it was very simple because our projects were very simple comparing with our projects nowadays.

Hyper-v capacity report (Powershell). Part 1

I am going to write about capacity. Some days ago one of our managers asked me about the ISO 20.000 and the capacity plan. He was looking for a simple dashboard to display our hypervisors capacity every month. So, I thought that using Powershell and SSRS could be a good idea to display and access this information.
So in this post I am going write about the draft version of the system that will generate this capacity dashboard.

ELK ( Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana) for Windows and Linux logs for easy data mining

Recently I have been testing ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for the visualisation and data mining with Syslog, Windows Event Viewer, Apache, SQUID and IIS logs.

Anyconnect ASA 8.3 profile

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Puppet in Windows Azure

Few month ago Microsoft announced the availability of Azure VM images with Puppet agent installed.
Puppet is a piece of software useful to manage hundreds o thousands of machines from a single point of management.
Today, I have tested this feature and here are the notes, I hope they will be useful to you.

Testing Vagrant Azure provider

Last weekend I tried Vagrant-Azure, it is still a little bit unstable.
First of all, I did some tests with Vagrant and Virtualbox on Windows, following this URL, in this first test everything went fine, no problems.

Later, I wanted to use a Azure as provider and I had to install Vagrant-Azure Plugin https://github.com/MSOpenTech/Vagrant-Azure