Many of you might know Pi-hole and use it for blocking ADs. I also used it for a long time in my homenetwork, running it on a Raspberry Pi. A customer of mine then drew my attention to dnsforge.de.

What is dnsforge.de?

dnsforge.de is a censorship-free, secure and redundant DNS resolver without logging, but with an ad blocker.

The server are hosted in Germany. dnsforge.de also offers clean.dnsforge.de, which offers parental control blocklists and Safe Search for search engines and YouTube.

In May 2022, Broadcom announced that it will buy VMware for outstanding $69 billion USD. 18 months later, in November 2023, China finally approved the merger. Chinese regulators were the latest in a long line of authorities to approve the takeover. VMware was gone. It was no “by Broadcom”. And not only the name changed.

There were already countless rumors in the 18 months before the takeover. Broadcoms CEO, Hock Tan, was known for trimming companies for profit. After all, $69 billion USD have to be recouped. So only a couple of days after the final approvement

This is a quick one. Sometimes you need to evacuate VMs from a host, do some maintenance, and redistribute the VMs to the originating host. This can be annoying, especially if you don’t have a vSphere Enterprise Plus license with DRS, DRS groups etc. These few PowerShell lines may help you.

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This blog will mark its 10th anniversary in January 2024. A decade ago, I embarked on a new blogging journey with the domain vcloudnine.de. Some of you might have known my former blog before I made the switch to vcloudnine.de. I’d been running blazilla.de for over 7 years. However, by the end of 2013, I grew weary of Serendipity, a PHP-powered weblog engine. I craved a shift to Wordpress, but back then, a seamless migration path wasn’t available. So, I made a fresh start with vcloudnine, built on Wordpress.

Usually I tend to use the iPhone WiFi hotspot feature. But lately, I had to switch to USB tethering, because I had to work a whole workday using the hotspot feature. USB tethering saves battery and the connection was more reliable for me. Please note, that you need to install iTunes to use USB tethering, because the necessary Ethernet driver is only available with iTunes. Without this driver, Windows won’t recorgnize the iPhone as an Ethernet connection.

While chilling on my couch, I stumbled over this pretty interesting Reddit thread: Story Time - How I blew up my company’s AD for 24 hours and fixed it : sysadmin (reddit.com)

Long story short: A poor guy applied some STIG hardening and his Active Directory blew up. Root cause was disabling RC4, which caused Kerberos failures, primarily documented by errors like “The encryption type requested is not supported by the KDC.” The guy fixed it by shutdown all domain controllers, changing the KRBTGT account password on one domain controller, and finally, everything came back

In the previous blog post I have showed you how to interactively log in into the Microsoft Graph API. You had to enter a username, a password, and you had to enter a second factor. This is typically not want you want if you want to automate things. But there is another way to get access to the Microsoft Graph API.

Create an app registration

To get access, you have to register an app in your AzureAD. Go to your Azure portal and select “App registration” from the “Manage” section. Add a new registration by clicking to “New registration”.

There is a new API in town… naa, not really new, but the Microsoft Graph API will replace most, if not all, other Azure AD/ Microsoft 365 APIs. Actually, Microsoft has planned to retire Azure AD Graph API and ADAL in Juni 2022. Now they have postponed this date to somewhere after December 2022. This will give you some extra time to refactor your PowerShell scrips and move them to use the PowerShell SDK for Graph.

Scrolling through my Twitter timeline is a common task to start my day. This morning, a tweet from @BleepinComputer has caught my attention.

Microsoft rolls back decision to block Office macros by default - @sergheihttps://t.co/9BK0slNuEw

— BleepingComputer (@BleepinComputer) July 7, 2022

My first reaction: WHAT. THE. FUCK?! Microsoft added this as feature 88883 in februrary 2022 to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, and I was pretty happy about this feature. Let’s take a look at this change.

Ausnahmsweise ein Blogpost in deutscher Sprache. Grund dafür ist, dass Claudia Kühn und ich seit Januar 2022 einen gemeinsamen Podcast rund um den Themenkomplex Datacenter, Cloud und IT ein. Eine lockere Kaminzimmerrunde in der wir entspannt über unseren Job, und alles was damit zu tun hat, plaudern.

Der Podcast erscheint alle zwei Wochen auf den üblichen Kanälen, oder ihr schaut auf der Homepage des Podcasts vorbei. Lasst gernen einen Kommentar/ Feedback da, und gebt uns eine Bewertung auf iTunes.