Posts

Out-of-Office replies are dropped due to empty MAIL FROM

Today I had an interesting support call. A customer noticed that Out-of-Office replies were not received by recipients, even though the OoO option were enabled for internal and external recipients. Internal recipients got the OoO reply, but none of the external recipients. The Message Tracking Log is a good point to start. I quickly discovered that the Exchange server was unable to send the OoO mails. You can use the eventid FAIL to get a list of all failed messages.

Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 is now generally available

Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses. Last week, Vembu has announced the availability of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0! Vembu’s new release is all about maintaining business continuity and ensuring high availability. Apart from new features, this release features significant enhancements and bug fixes that are geared towards performance improvement.

Exam prep & experience: Citrix NetScaler Advanced Topics: Security, Management, and Optimization (1Y0-340)

In May 2018, Citrix released their new Citrix Certified Expert - Networking certification, which completet the networking certification path at the upper end (blog post on training.citrix.com). The track starts with the Associate (CCA-N), the lower-level certification is a requirement for achieving the higher-level certification, continues with the Professional (CCP-N), and ends with the Expert (CCE-N) certification. This is pretty cool, and I’m very happy that Citrix now offers the CCE-N, because the expert-level certification was missing all the time.

Vembu VMBackup Deployment Scenarios

Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite. One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way.

"Cannot execute upgrade script on host" during ESXi 6.5 upgrade

I was onsite at one of my customers to update a small VMware vSphere 6.0 U3 environment to 6.5 U2c. The environment consists of three hosts. Two hosts in a cluster, and a third host is only used to run a HPE StoreVirtual Failover Manager. The update of the first host, using the Update Manager and a HPE custom ESX 6.5 image, was pretty flawless. But the update of the second host failed with “Cannot execute upgrade script on host”

High CPU usage on Citrix ADC VPX

While building a small Citrix NetScaler… ehm… ADC VPX (I really hate this name…) lab environment, I noticed that the fan of my Lenovo T480s was spinning up. I was wondering why, because the VPX VM was just running for a couple of minutes - without any load. But the task manager told me, that the VMware Workstation Process was consuming 25% (I have a Intel i5 Quad Core CPU) CPU.

Using Let's Encrypt DNS-01 challenge validation with local BIND instance

I’m using Let’s Encrypt certificates for a while now. In the past, I used the standalone plugin (TLS-SNI-01) to get or renew my certificates. But now I switched to the DNS plugin. I run my own name servers with BIND, so it was a very low hanging fruit to get this plugin to work. To get or renew a certificate, you need to provide some kind of proof that you are requesting the certificate for a domain that is under your control.

EAPoL forwarding on NEC VoIP phones

A customer is running their PCs behind their VoIP phones. Nothing unusual, most VoIP phones I know have an embedded ethernet switch, so that you only need one cable to connect PC and VoIP phone to your network. As part of a network security project, my colleague and I implemented IEEE 802.1X port-based Network access control at one of our customers networks. The setup consists of multiple Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OmniSwitches (6450-P10 and 6860/E) and Aruba ClearPass.

Powering on a VM with shared VMDK fails after extending a EagerZeroedThick VMDK

I hope that you are not reading this blog post while searching for a solution for a failed cluster. If so, feel free to leave a comment if this blog post saved your evening or weekend. :) Last friday, a change at one of my customers went horribly wrong. I was not onsite, but they contacted me during the night from friday to saturday, because their most important Windows Server Failover Cluster was unable to start after extending a shared VMDK.

What is in the bag?

Michael White published the third release of his “What is in the bag” blog post. In reference to this, I would like to share the content of my bag. I used a RIMOWA Salsa business trolley for several years. Unfortunately, it broke in June 2017 and a repair was refused by RIMOWA. I was very disappointed of the product quality and the customer service experience with RIMOWA. I decided to switch to a backpack, which felt much more comfortable than carrying or pulling the RIMOWA trolley.