For the gentleman requesting assistance with my UltimateOCD script, I have revised it further to allow you to easily provide some parameters like the target directory, directory exclusions, and a custom temporary directory path. In addition, I have revised the logic to use the “product” & “x.x.x” (version number) directories to detect Oracle client instances….
Build Your Own “Lab Hydration Kit”
When performing iterative development or testing work, it is critical to be able to quickly stand up a “clean slate” environment. The concept behind the hydration kit is to be able to rapidly “hydrate” a small Windows Domain to simulate a small enterprise environment, “Just add water!” When I am configuring an enterprise lab environment,…
Thoughts on Obfuscation of Botnet C2 Communications
This afternoon, while mountain biking, I was listening to a cybersecurity podcast about botnets. The gentleman on the episode was discussing detection of unknown botnets by looking at recurring patterns from the level of a dynamic DNS provider. A provider like this has incredible insight into web traffic on a global scale. The man described…
Homelab – SSD Types and VM Performance
The idea that Solid-State Drives (SSDs) have superior performance when compared to the Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) of yesteryear has become common amongst administrators. And, for many applications, SSDs have now proven themselves. Many administrators have not indulged beyond this concept. However, if you are building a machine with performance in mind, you might take…
Preliminary Batch Job Version – Ultimate Oracle Client Deinstaller
This is for the gentleman that kindly requested a modification of my UltimateOCD script to allow for batch deployment. Please note that this preliminary example is untested. I will be testing and revising in the days to come, but this may get you on the right track with some testing of your own. In the…
JavaScript – Bot Repellant – Obfuscation
For obvious reasons, it is not a good idea to have your contact information displayed in plaintext on the web. Webcrawlers and bots do exist, and will use RegEx to pick emails and phone numbers out of client-side-source like it’s a cakewalk. Now, ideally, your implementation of what I am dubbing “bot-repellant”, would include server-side…
PowerShell – Update to Ultimate Oracle Deinstaller
A few months back, I had built what I dubbed the “Ultimate Oracle Client Deinstaller.” It could handle the deinstallation of Oracle database clients 11g, 12c, and 19c to include having multiple clients installed- even if they share the same Oracle_Home location. Recently, I ran into some alternate configurations of the Oracle client that required…
PowerShell – Add + Trust PsGallery & NuGet
If you do a lot of PowerShell work, you may find yourself frequently using NuGet or PsGallery. I’ve put a couple functions together that quickly add the PsGallery repository and NuGet respectively, and add trust to these sources. These functions were built to be modular so they could be modified for other sources as well….
PowerShell – Add Hosts to AD Group
Here’s another simple script I put together. It allows you to specify a Security Group in Active Directory, and add a list of hosts to this group. Simple, but yet another tool that every SysAdmin should have in their repository.
PowerShell – Get OS By Device Name
Here’s a basic script I put together to generate a .CSV report of the operating system for a given list of device names. A handy tool for any sysadmin to add to their repository.