vCenter – Management Ports
KB ID 0001324 Problem A while ago my colleague was struggling to get into a vCenter server. Normal https (TCP 443) wasn’t letting him in, I knew you could manage the appliance directly, (but I couldn’t remember the port number!) He knew there was an alternate port number, but we didn’t know what it was. Solution vCenter Appliance (Direct) Management Port TCP: 5480 i.e. https://{ip-or-host-name}:5480 vCenter /...
FirePOWER Agent – Real-Time Status ‘Unavailable’
KB ID 0001323 D Problem I was deploying a Cisco FirePOWER user agent last week, but once setup, the agent reported that the Real-Time status for SOME of the domain controllers was permanently ‘Unavailable’. Now I know you have to be patient with these things so I went and had a coffee. Still it refused to ‘go green’. Solution I addition to all the other rights and firewall rules that you normally have to check....
Cisco FirePOWER Management Center Appliance – Allowing Domain Authentication
KB ID 0001117 Problem Once deployed, authentication is handled by the appliances own internal user database, in larger organisations this is a little impractical. So the ability to create an Active Directory Group, and delegate access to Firesight to members of that group is a little more versatile. Solution I’m making the assumption that the appliance does not already have external authentication setup at all, so I’ll...
Cisco ASA – Gernerate RSA Keypair From ASDM
KB ID 0001322 Problem I’ve lost count of the number of times this has happened to me! Most of my colleagues prefer to use the ASDM for remote management, but if (like me) you work at command line, then sometimes people <ahem> forget to generate the RSA keypair when deploying a firewall. Then even if SSH access and AAA is setup correctly, you still can’t get in via SSH. Instead you see the following; RoyalTS and...
Audi – MMI v3 – Showing Album Art With Mp3 Files
KB ID 0001116 Problem A few weeks ago I changed cars, I was pleased to see that the entertainment system in my new car could play music from SD card. These are cheap and can hold a Lot of songs, so rather than have my iPod in the car, I could simply drop music onto an SD card. Which I did but, annoyingly non of the ‘album artwork’ was displayed, even though the music played fine. I did some Googling and read a few Audi...
Updating the AnyConnect client for Deployment from the Cisco ASA 5500
KB ID 0000704 Problem Your ASA will (by default) update your AnyConnect clients to the latest client software when they connect. However you need to supply the ASA with the updated packages first. Solution 1. Download the latest AnyConnect client package, from Cisco. The one you want will have a file extension of .pkg AnyConnect 4 AnyConnect 3 2. Connect to the ASDM > Configuration > Remote Access VPN > Network (Client)...
Windows Folder Redirection
KB ID 0000467 Problem Q: What is Folder Redirection? A: Essentially you can take folders that hold things like your “My documents” or your “Favorites” folder, and put them out on a network server, which is great if you want to back that sort of information up for disaster recovery. Q: What’s the difference between this and a roaming / roving profile? A: Folder redirection keeps information on a server...
Ubuntu: Setting Up a WordPress Website with LEMP – Part 3
KB ID 0001320 Problem So you want your own web server running WordPress? Previously in Parts One and Two, we setup a new Linux box, and got all the prerequisites installed. Now it’s time to deploy WordPress. Solution There are a few extra bits we need to add to the PHP installation before we setup WordPress, to get those installed run the following command; sudo apt-get install php-curl php-gd php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-xml...
Ubuntu: Setting Up a WordPress Website with LEMP – Part 2
KB ID 0001319 Problem Back in part one we deployed the server and setup our database, now we are going to setup our nginx web server, and get it to work with PHP. Solution Install NGINX To get the nginx package installed; sudo apt install nginx Now ensure nginx is set to start automatically with the server, and manually start the service. sudo systemctl enable nginx sudo systemctl start nginx Make sure it’s up and running;...
Cisco ASA: ‘ERROR: Multiple Peers can be specified only with originate-only connections’
KB ID 0001316 Problem This week I had a client who had a head office and three satellite sites. They had old firewalls (a 5510 and 5505’s), and my firm had installed FTTC circuits, into the sites for them. My job was to reconfigure the firewalls and the site to site VPN tunnels (each site had a tunnel to the other sites), then disconnect their old ADSL connections, change the firewalls public IP, then connect to the shiny new...