CrowdSpot – https://www.crowdspot.io/hotspots This tool allows anyone to explore Helium Network Hotspot data in an effort to understand atypical Hotspot behavior and identify anomalies.
I decided to write a little bit about the Microsoft Learn portal. We all know that Microsoft is one (if not the) standard for many business applications and cloud offerings. They also offer certifications on their products from basic fundamentals all the way up to the expert level. But how do you learn, practice, and eventually master the skills/knowledge needed to either professionally use or become certified in any of the Microsoft family of technologies? Well, the answer is Microsoft Learn.
The Microsoft Learn portal can really meet all of your learning needs. It can provide you the documentation for any of their current product offerings. It can walk you through any of the Microsoft exams, and the skills they cover. Microsoft has put together self-paced training modules that you can use. And best of all, they basically offer some sort of module for everything they offer. If you are interested in learning anything Microsoft-related, then it really behooves you to start looking at the Microsoft Learn site to begin or supplement your learning materials.
There is so much knowledge that is just sitting there, waiting for you. If it’s a Microsoft product, and you’re interested in it, then Microsoft Learn is where you need to go!
Here is how to install docker and docker-compose on the (AWS) Amazon Linux 2 OS running on either an EC2 or Lightsail instance.
Let’s begin by opening a console or SSH session to your EC2 or Lightsail instance. You can do this from within your AWS portal or an SSH tool like Putty. The actual “how to connect” to your server is outside the scope of this article.
Once you are connected, let us start by installing any pending updates on your host.
sudo yum update
Next, we will install Docker.
sudo yum install docker
Create a new membership group for docker and add the ec2-user to it so you can run all of the docker commands without needing to use the sudo command.
sudo usermod -a -G docker ec2-user
id ec2-user
newgrp docker
So how does someone install Docker on Ubuntu? Let me show you… We’re starting off with a freshly installed Ubuntu 20.04 virtual machine that has been updated but has not had anything additional added to it yet.
We will start with adding some packages that are prerequisites for using the ‘apt’ commands over HTTPS and thus for Docker.
And the step everyone was waiting for, installing Docker.
sudo apt install docker-ce
Now we need to allow our user to run Docker commands without always needing to ‘sudo’. We can add the user we are logged in as by using this command.
sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}
Okay now as an optional step, you can install Docker-Compose. At the time of writing this, it is on v2.7.0. You will want to check their release page and update the command below to the current version number.
Okay, it’s time to install Git so you can play with some pull and merge requests for some projects you are working on. This set of instructions should work on your system regardless if you are running CentOS 7, 8, or 9.
The first thing to do is elevate…
sudo su
Then update your system.
dnf update
Install Git
dnf install git
Check the installed version
git --version
Just like that, you are ready to “Git” yourself back to coding something grand!
Docker is an operating system virtualization tool that allows us to run applications as containers. In simplest terms, that means you are virtualizing only the application, and not creating an entire virtual machine as you would traditionally do in hypervisors like VMware, Hyper-V, or Nutanix.
Okay, that’s cool… How do we install Docker so we can start to test workloads on it? Well, let me show you how to install Docker on a virtual machine running CentOS 9 Stream. **While I have not tested to confirm, this Docker installation method should be identical on CentOS 8 Stream, as well as for CentOS 7.x
Let us begin by shifting to Sudo mode by running this command first…
sudo su
Then the first thing to do is remove PodMan as it conflicts with Docker.
Let us view what we installed by running these two commands.
rpm -q docker-ce
docker version
Congratulations! You now have Docker installed on your machine.
You’ll probably want to install Docker Compose on your machine too so you can build and run a docker image. You can install it with this simple command.
So the caveat to this article is that this is specifically for Windows Servers. If you’re trying to enable multiple RDP sessions on Windows 10 or 11, you’ll need to do some further googling to find out how to do that – as this alone won’t be enough.
Enable Multiple RDP Sessions
Log into the server you are trying to enable multiple Remote Desktop sessions on.
Click on the start menu button, type “gpedit.msc” and open it.
I ran into this last week when I was helping someone “fix” their server. They couldn’t reach, or ping, their host, and when running an “ipconfig /all” command it was returning that the machine’s IP was ‘duplicate’.
Worth Noting: So sometimes when a server reports that its’ IP is a ‘duplicate’ it can be a DHCP mishap. It can happen when a server is assigned a static IP that is within a DHCP pool, and because there was no reservation, DHCP hands the IP out to some other machine. Thus two machines are trying to use the same, duplicate, IP address. When that happens you’ll need to resolve it by creating an IP reservation for the “correct” machine, and then releasing the IP from the machine that “incorrectly” took the IP from the pool so it can be assigned a new IP.
The machine I was fixing lived in a subnet that did not use DHCP and only had machines that were statically assigned their IPs in it. So the possible resolution mentioned above did not fit my scenario. So, what could it be? Well if you have a static IP set, and the DHCP service is enabled, Windows likes to give you an address on the 169.x.x.x network. Which just breaks the ip traffic on your server. Here’s how to fix it…
Step 1.
Open a command prompt
Step 2. Enter
"ipconfig /all"
Find what your system’s preferred IP is and if autoconfiguration is enabled, and the name of the interface that they are on. You will need this for the next step.
Step 3. Enter
netsh interface ipv4 show interface
Find the index number that is assigned to the interface you identified in the step above, you will need it in the next step.
Step 4.
Run the command below, but replace ’69’ with the index number that you identified in the step above.
netsh interface ipv4 set interface 69 dadtransmits=0 store=persistent
Step 5. Enter
services.msc
Disable the DHCP Client service. If you ever revert from a static IP back to a DHCP IP, you will need to re-enable this service and set it back to automatic.
Step 6.
Restart your computer. After your system reboots, its static IP should now be the correct IP you had configured on it, and your IP traffic to/from it should be back to normal.
Congratulations, autoconfiguration has been disabled.
If you’re ever tracking down where a suspicious came from, it can be hard to determine if it was downloaded off of the “dirty” internet, or if someone actually created the file locally on the machine. Well if you know how to check the file’s alternative data stream, it actually becomes pretty easy to determine if it was in fact downloaded. You don’t know what the alternate data stream is, or how to check? We can fix that.
First a little background. The “Zone Identifier Alternate Data Stream” is often referred to as the Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW). The MOTW was actually a security feature first introduced by Internet Explorer for determining how to run saved HTML webpages. It has since grown to become implemented into many other file types. Whenever a file is downloaded, your browser implements MOTW by utilizing a feature of the NTFS file system called the alternate data stream (ADS) to associate a data stream to that file. The browser creates an ADS called “Zone.Identifier” and then adds the ZoneId to the stream to specify where the file came from. The ADS will be <file>:Zone.Identifier.
The ZoneId can have the following values:
0. Local Computer
1. Local Intranet
2. Trusted Sites
3. Internet
4. Restricted Sites
Enough of the background… Let us get back to the hands-on part.
To check the files’ ADS & ZoneId from a command prompt, use the following syntax. The “file” we’re going to be checking is named: file.ext
notepad file.ext:Zone.Identifier
Alternatively, to check the file with PowerShell, use either of the following cmdlets.
