My place on the net to muse, share, and sometimes rant
Ran into an issue today trying to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 Beta.
Kept getting error 0x80240023 no matter what I did.
Solution: Download the ISO from
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewiso
Mount it and install from there
There’ a disturbing amount of conspiracies racing around the internet but there’s almost always a common reaction to challenging them, and it’s the equivalent of a child plugging their ears and screaming.
Here’s a story of my encounter many years ago with one of those.
We recently had a client having an issue with the ScanSnap Home software crashing on startup giving a nearly useless “Unexpected error has occurred” message.
No codes, nothing useful, only suggesting to uninstall and re-install the application.
The initial tech working on this did exactly that, even throwing in some reboots.
No change.
It was passed to me and I found an article about it on Fujitsu’s site, and it said they are aware of it and there is no fix.
Great.
Well I’m not satisfied with an answer like that, especially since this was working on other peoples PCs and nothing else was wrong.
There was nothing recently changed, and no updates recently applied, so that ruled out a lot.
My networking experience is in the small realm.
Because of this, I don’t get to play with Cisco’s that much, mostly their small business line.
Lately I’ve been exposed to their slightly more complex systems, including stacked switches.
I get the concept and it certainly has a place in the right environment.
Just not in most of my environments because of the cost of equipment and support.
So my first attempt at doing a minor revision update on a series of stacked switches didn’t go, terribly well…
Read More
When I got my first real IT job I knew I wanted to learn more.
I was exposed to all sorts of new technologies and implementations I had never seen before.
However I quickly ran into a wall when I wanted to learn more; there wasn’t any real time for me to do so during work hours, and they weren’t keen on educating me (part of the reason I left).
After recycling gobs and gobs of old tech from clients I finally got my chance.
Read MoreA common question, and I’m glad you’re aware you have backup and its importance!
With so many backup systems and options, it can be easy to get overwhelmed. So I’m going to break it down to the basics in order for you to make an informed decision!
The general rule of backups is to have at least 2 backups, one on-premise, and one offsite.
I won’t get into the details of best practices in this post, this more of a general understanding, we’ll dig in to the dirt later.
The main purpose of an on-premise backup system is for what is called a “rapid recovery”.
It’s cheap, relatively easy, and once the upfront costs are done, that’s it, no further investment, barring storage failure or upgrades.
These type of systems tend to store a lot of data, and can be very fast to restore a little, a lot, or all your data relatively quickly!
Relative to what? That will make sense shortly.
Now why wouldn’t you just want to go with the on-premise backup which is usually a “set it and forget it” type of system?
It’s the physical nature of it, it’s just as susceptible to risks mentioned below as your main systems.
The second kind of backup you’ll need is an off-site backup for the most dreaded type of restore, “disaster recovery”.
In the event of the worst happening to your equipment, let’s say a fire or natural disaster, your on-premise system went out along with it.
This has also helped out when the office is offline for an extended period, let’s say a week or more of power loss, but with just a little data you can keep afloat from home.
So why bother with on-premise, why not an off-site only option?
Sure it’ll cost more but now I don’t have to worry about losing my data anymore, right?
Eh, not exactly.
In the event of a large data loss that will require a lot of it to be restored, this can take a VERY long time depending on your setup.
Instead of the few hours an on-premise can have it done, it could take days to restore from off-site.
There’s also one other reason to have multiple backups.
No single solution is perfect.
Either system could experience a failure of some kind, or worse, become corrupted/infected.
Having different systems in place can negate that risk.
I’ll be creating posts in the future going over on-site and off-site backup systems, best practices, and other details.
Stay tuned!
So my spam folder is flooded with a bunch of junk coming from various “info@whatever” email accounts.
Most likely, these are full blown email mailboxes set up for some kind of easy handling or processing, but not actively monitored or secured and were compromised.
If you’re looking to create an email address that’s just going to be used to re-direct messages, or for incoming only, don’t bother setting up a full blown account.
Services like Office 365 give you ability to create email addresses called “distribution lists”.
This email address will handle incoming mail and forward it to the appropriate persons in your organization.
You can also use a “shared mailbox” that can allow you to not only monitor it like a second account, but also store the emails, as a distribution list will only forward, not store.
There are some other features each can do, but the key is to restrict them.
If no one will be sending as “info@”, don’t give anyone the right to.
For shared mailboxes, disable their ability to sign in, since you’re not supposed to be signing in directly to it anyway.
Using those 2 types of email accounts gives you some incredible control and accountability.
Handling things like “info”, “sales”, etc., like this helps not only organize your communication flow, it helps keep your business secure.
The icing on the cake, those types of email accounts are free in Office 365!
Other emails services can offer similar features, some don’t offer anything except basic email accounts.
Talk to your IT provider/person or email provider and ask if they can help set those kinds of things up for you.
Ran into a funky issue today. And yes I’m aware of the large risk, but like every rule there’s an exception.
Client has a Sonicwall with SSL VPN enabled on 443, and management port open on 4433.
It would appear that the Mac Mobile Connect client has a hard coded check for port 4433, as the VPN client kept asking for wrong certificate.
Setting the :443 port on the server name resulted in the client asking to redirect to port 4433, default port for SSL VPN.
On a hunch I changed the management port and now it’s working perfectly.
It would seem the Mac version is hard coded to check and try port 4433, as NetExtender and the Windows Mobile Connect didn’t have a problem.
What does that mean?
To be blunt, when you get a flat tire because of a nail in the road and your cell phone stops working the next day, do you blame the nail?
This is a common connection that people do when it comes to technology. And while many things are interconnected these days. They don’t always have an impact on each other.
So before you go blaming that tech that touched your PC last week for a website not working, please slow down and approach this as separate. Connecting dots that don’t need to be can take a simple issue and make it far more complex.
Always be truthful and relay as much info as possible. It’s one thing to forget or miss something, we’re all human. When you mislead, we go down the longer or flat out wrong path because you gave bad directions.
I started writing this long ago but I still want to say goodbye.
A bittersweet era has arrived.
We say goodbye to another beloved version of Windows.
Climbing to the ranks of XP levels of stability and adoption, it has reached the day of retirement well earned. Read More
CWtheNerd - Life inside of technology 