system administrator

To create a tar.gz archive from a given folder you can use the following command tar -zcvf tar-archive-name.tar.gz source-folder-name This will compress the contents of source-folder-name to a tar.gz archive named tar-archive-name.tar.gz To extract a tar.gz compressed archive you can use the...

What is HSTS HSTS is the great little response header that tells a browser to always use SSL/TLS to communicate with your site. It doesn’t matter if the user, or a link they are clicking, specifies HTTP, HSTS will remove the ability for a compatible browser to use HTTP and will enforce the use...

In this post, I will share my very simple configuration to redirect HTTP to HTTPS using Nginx web server. With my configuration below, Nginx will simply forwards port 80 to 443. Very useful when you have a service that only listens on 443 (https) then you can use Nginx to forward all of your...

In this brief tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use Windows’ own remote desktop connection protocol to connect to Ubuntu Linux 16.04 / 17.10 and 18.04 / 18.10 desktops using Xrdp. Xrdp is an open-source remote desktop protocol server which uses RDP to present a GUI to the client. It...

Prefer to see what’s actually happening in the background when your CentOS Linux is booting up? Edit /etc/default/grub with your favourite editor, such as nano or vi. [andy@av ~]# cat /etc/default/grub GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"...

In this post we will learn how to clone Windows from Larger Disk to Smaller Disk, in most cases we do this when we want to do HDD to SSD Upgrade, the hard disk drive usually has a larger size than our solid-state drive. We need to make sure that our C drive will fit into our SSD drive. Click...

Prefer to see what’s actually happening in the background when Ubuntu Desktop Linux booting up? Wait for Ubuntu to boot, then login and start a Terminal application Edit /etc/default/grub as root, for example: sudo nano /etc/default/grub Remove splash from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT Save the...

Easy Guide on how to setup MikroTik Site-to-Site IPsec Tunnel If one of MikroTik’s WAN IP address is dynamic, set up the router as the initiator (i.e. dial-out) If you are working from WAN, don’t forget to enable Safe Mode. Let’s go to Winbox -> IP -> IPsec -> Proposals, and this is the...

A quick walkthrough on how to upgrade or migrate an Active Directory Server. In this guide, the old server is Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, and the new server is Windows Server 2016 Essentials. This guide should work on other Windows Server version as the concept would be pretty much the...

This is a brief guide on how to implement an L2TP/IPSec VPN server on Mikrotik RouterOS and use it as a gateway. Change these to fit your setup: This router’s local IP address: 172.31.1.1/20 WAN connection is PPPoE with the name ether1-GTW. If you use PPPoE, use the name of your PPPoE...

Is someone left from your office? Here is the best practice to do with their mailbox. With Office 365, we can take advantage of keeping inactive users in the cloud without affecting our quota without any license required. Go to Admin centers -> Exchange At the Exchange admin center dashboard...

I’ve seen several places where a smaller company has been integrated into a large company, or where the number of Macs in the company has grown, and now you want those users to have their machines and login managed under the network directory system, be that Open Directory or Active Directory...

Follow these steps to renew your 3CX SSL certificate (assuming that the PBX in question is SP0 as the last contact with 3CX servers has been made from a 15.5 SP0 – In this case, the system must be updated to the latest service pack) To force the update: If the version is lower than v15.5 SP2...

Don’t like your Windows performs automatically download, install updates and restart by itself? Click Start and type in: ‘gpedit.msc‘. Go to: Local Computer Policy -» Computer Configuration -» Administrative Templates -» Windows Components -» Windows Update -» Configure Automatic Updates. Set...

I attended 3CX training on 6-7 March 2017 at the Grand Millennium Hotel, Auckland CBD. Here are my notes and tips for 3CX best practices, please feel free to add by posting a comment down below. As of March 2017, Sonicwall Firewall requires a hotfix to be able to work properly with 3CX. SIP...

Open up regedit.exe and head to the following key, creating it if the key path isn’t there: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System Once you are there, create a new 32-bit DWORD on the right-hand side named VerboseStatus, giving it a value of 1. Now when...

LOGICnow MAX Backup can be used to recover a system from scratch. Bare metal recovery allows you to recover your system directly to bare hardware (or VM) without a prior OS installation and return to its previous state. Supported operating systems (as of 2016-10-06): Windows Vista Windows 7...

This solution will usually also fix any Outlook that having stuck issues while on ‘Loading Profile’ screen Outlook 2016 Loading Profile Exit Outlook, and browse to <drive>:\Program Files — or, if you see a Program Files (x86) folder on the same drive, browse to that instead. For example...

How to Create a Shortcut that allows a Standard User to Run an Application as Administrator Want to allow a standard user account to run an application as administrator without a UAC or password prompt? You can easily create a shortcut that uses the runas command with the /savecred switch...

Readers will learn how to run the UniFi controller software as a Windows service. Windows services are often useful since they are “background” applications which don’t require any attention on the part of the end-user. In this way, the service will launch upon startup, without any intervention...