Replacing Cisco Firewalls with Fortinet Firewalls
KB ID 0001741 Replacing Cisco If you’ve been following articles on the site you will know that the focus of the firewall related output is shifting from Cisco ASA / Cisco FirePOWER to Fortinet (FortiGate) firewalls. This article is so you can make an informed choice about what you want to replace your Cisco firewall with. Note: I’m starting with SOHO and Business sized firewalls but I will extend this to ‘Enterprise...
VMware ESX – Sockets and Cores (Logical Processors)
KB ID 0001124 Problem While explaining to a client the difference between Sockets, Cores, Logical processors, I had to revisit this post today, so I updated it for vSphere7 Calculating Sockets and Cores Essentially; A: Processor Sockets: The Physical amount of CPUs on the motherboard. B: Cores Per Socket: For a dual core processor this would be 2, triple core=3, quad core = 4, hex core = 6, octa core=8, deca core=12, etc. C: Logical...
Azure Traffic Manager (DNS Failover)
KB ID 0001740 Problem Why Azure Traffic Manager? I had to price up a hardware load balancer (ADC) a couple of weeks ago for a client. I wont mention the vendor, (though I’m sure you can guess). Over 3 years it was going to cost (for a pair) about £100k, (so about 33k a year). That included the global DNS failover, this was so they, (the client) could fail over their services between multiple data centres. OK there are other ADC...
Free Exchange Certificate
KB ID 0001739 Problem A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about getting free certificates for IIS with ‘Let’s Encrypt’. Last week the renewal for my ‘test’ Exchange server’s certificate came though. So I thought “Why don’t I try and get a ‘Free Exchange Certificate’?” Free Exchange Certificate Before we start let’s take a moment to take a look at our existing...
Leave Domain: “A general network error occurred’
KB ID 0001738 Problem After a recent lab on the test bench, I ended up with a 2008 x32 standard server. It took me a while to get this setup and running, so I wanted to keep it (or turn it into a VMware template should I ever need another). But first I needed to ‘remove it’ from the domain it was in. However, when attempting to do so this happened; Computer Name /Domain Changes The following error occurred validating...
O365 with Duo MFA (Without a P1 License?)
KB ID 0001737 Problem Working for a cloud service provider, (and a Duo partner). I get a lot of queries about Duo MFA for Office 365. Typically (I think) the best solution is to enable Azure Conditional Access and couple that with Trusted sites, so clients get challenged when out on the road, but not in the office. The drawback of this is Azure Conditional Access requires a P1 License, at time of writing that’s about $6 a month...