A Windows System Admin's Blog

Useful Debug commands for ArubaOS (AOS) Switches

John — Tue, 12 May 2026 03:42:00 +0000

I was recently out at a site working through an 802.1x wired implementation, their site runs all Aruba Networking gear running older style ArubaOS (or AOS) which is basically the ProCurve/ProVision with a mix of 2930f, 3810m switches and 5406zl chassis. The hard work of certificates has already been done sine we earlier did a 802.1x EAP-TLS deployment for them. After doing the initial build out…

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Using your SSH Keys from 1Password in WinSCP

John — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:16:02 +0000

So my main workstation and laptop run Windows. We run 1Password to store our passwords and SSH keys and while with the 1Password SSH Agent I can use keys for OpenSSH in Windows and this works well, the same isn’t true for use with WinSCP which only uses Putty Agent (Pageant) to access keys and isn’t exposed to any other agents. After some Google-Fu, I stumbled upon this project…

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Certificate Chain Error when updating Certificates in Aruba ClearPass

John — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:05:00 +0000

I was recently contacted by someone to assist with some maintenance on their Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager servers. One of those tasks was replacing their expiring, but everytime they went to replace it they got an error along the lines of Certificate chain is invalid. The expected order is Policy Manager Server, Sub CA and Root CA certificates even though the certificate files were valid I…

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Using WireGuard on Windows with no local administrator rights

John — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 11:15:06 +0000

I’ve recently been helping a non-profit uplift their security – we’ve put in a UniFi Gateway along with cleaning up their 365 tenancy and endpoint management. As part of this, we’ve implemented a WireGuard VPN back to their NAS as well as remove local admin rights from end users. Unfortunately, WireGuard by default requires local admin rights to function, however we can get around this with a few…

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Linux VM Performance on Hyper-V

John — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 02:43:14 +0000

I was recently on a call with a customer who had migrated their VMs to a new Hyper-V host (and away from VMWare) and had a few Ubuntu VMs for hosting their PHP stack of applications. Part of the call we were doing a review of some of the VMs and the customer complained that they were facing some performance issues with the Ubuntu VMs that they previously never had with VMWare.

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How to quickly Document Conditional Access Policies into PowerPoint

John — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 02:50:33 +0000

I was recently engaged to review a organisation’s Entra configuration around Password Security and their Conditional Access policies. Now I’ve seen tenants with the number of policies ranging from a handful to hundreds of policies over the years, these guys had about 50, which is still quite a few to go through by hand. Now doing this by hand takes a heap of time however I recently stumbled upon…

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Publish Remote Apps and Desktop Session at the same time

John — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:19:43 +0000

I was recently building a PoC Lab environment for a client where I only had a couple of virtual machines to play with to build a Remote Desktop Services environment to host a line of business application. I needed to be able to publish the application as a Remote App as well as have a virtual desktop. This is usually straight forward if you have multiple session hosts however requires a registry…

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Configure IIS to allow downloads for file types

John — Sun, 25 May 2025 23:28:00 +0000

I was recently in a bit of a bind and needed to get a large file from a server to another workstation, the server had IIS and was already live on the internet but when I copied across the file and tried to download it but was getting a 404 File not found. The file extension was .bak which isn’t a file type that IIS understands whether to execute or stream or present to a web browser in a…

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Increase Limit of Data Expert for Tables, Views and Stored Procs in Crystal Reports

John — Tue, 13 May 2025 10:59:09 +0000

I’ve been recently doing some consulting for a school using a piece of software (a SIS called Synergetic) that uses Crystal Reports and switching to a new workstation has meant there were a few things I needed to get set up again. One of the frustrations I quickly found was that the Data Expert view wasn’t showing all of the Tables, Views and Stored Procedures I was expecting. While there isn’t…

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Enable SNMP for PRTG with PowerShell

John — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 01:23:00 +0000

An MSP I do some consulting for use PRTG for their monitoring of environments. SNMP is a lightweight monitoring method for PRTG which trumps WMI monitoring. and doesn’t require admin rights on the local machine (or the shortcut of using a domain admin account). I’ve got a quick PowerShell script that will install the SNMP service in Windows and then configure the Community Name/

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