Category: Incoherent Ramblings

Random and probably incoherent posts with no particular category.

Stage Only & Stage and Install buttons greyed out on VCSA Update

A new blog post in under a year.. wonders will never cease. Since my last post I’ve changed jobs and passed AZ-104.

So I ran into the above issue while updating my home lab, both the buttons were greyed out. I found William Lam’s excellent post, but just running the delete’s didn’t solve the issue for me, a full reboot of the VCSA was also required. After cleaning up the files and rebooting, then the buttons were ungreyed and I was able to update it.

Just in case his post disappears, these are the commands I ran.

rm -rf /storage/core/software-update/updates
rm -rf /storage/updatemgr/software-*
rm /etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf
rm /storage/db/patching.db*
rm -r /storage/core/software-update/*
reboot

Enable Exchange services after upgrade

So much for remembering to regularly post updates.. Ahh well.

Sometimes things go wrong with Exchange updates which Microsoft covers fairly well in it’s documentation. I recently ran into the described situation Exchange wasn’t working after the update as all the services were disabled. Now you could just enable them all, but as Microsoft notes some services are disabled by default and you should verify in the logs which services were disabled.

Here’s a quick PowerShell one liner to pull the list of services that were disabled from the logs and enable and start them. Hope someone finds it useful.

Get-Content -Path C:\ExchangeSetupLogs\ServiceControl.log | Where-Object { $_ -like "*Disabling service *"} | ForEach-Object { ($_ -split "'")[1]} | Sort-Object -Unique | ForEach-Object { Set-Service $_ -StartupType Automatic; Start-Service $_}

Feeling so kawaii….

I really need to remember to post on here more often lol..

Having spent last Thursday/Friday attending Kawaiicon I’m awash with cuteness.. But continuous scrubbing in the shower is helping get rid of it. For those of you scratching your head, KiwiCon, NZ’s favourite info sec conference is taking a break, and Kawaiicon is the somewhat cuter replacement.

Highlights for me were Peter Gutmann, Matthew Daley, and Mike Loss.

Peter’s talk on automotive control systems is enough to put me off owning a modern vehicle now or anytime soon until car manufacturers find a suitable way of having reliability and security.

Matthew made everyone in the room who’s employer uses a Gallagher/Cardax access system cringe a little bit at just how many insecure systems are out their in the real world.

Mike’s talk was a highly amusing anecdotal account of his first ever Red Team exercise.

The great shave

I’ve had a beard of some sort for about 17 years now. Next week I’ll be shaving it all off in the name of charity. You can make donations over at https://givealittle.co.nz/fundraiser/andysshave which are split between the Movember Foundation New Zealand, Prostate Cancer Foundation New Zealand, and Child Cancer FoundationMain image