With ever increasing amounts of spam and spear phishing attacks, many companies today are going out of their way to warn users when an email is received from an external, and potentially unsafe, source. Thankfully the Exchange Management Console makes it fairly straight forward to create transport rules to add disclaimers, re-write subject lines, and even insert html into emails for all types of situations.

Recently I was asked to add an [EXTERNAL] tag to the subject line of all incoming emails from outside the organization. Below are the steps to create a Hub Transport rule to accomplish such a task.

While setting up the new GNS3 1.4 Virtual Machine with VMware Workstation 12 Player, I ran into an interesting error that was preventing me from completing the installation.

Thankfully the fix is fairly straight forward and requires that we edit the VMware Workstation preferences file.

• Open preferences.ini in your text editor of choice
  • %Appdata%\VMware\preferences.ini
• Add or edit the following line, changing the path to where your virtual machines are stored
  • prefvmx.defaultVMPath = "C:\Path\To\My\VMs"
• And that’s it. Save the ini and restart the GNS3 Setup Wizard.

After following the Prime Infrastructure upgrade path to 2.2 you’ll need to re-issue CA signed certificates. Unfortunately, this can’t be accomplished from the Web GUI and will need to be done via the CLI.

Here’s Cisco’s documentation for installing CA-Signed Certificates and the steps I used to import a new certificate from our Active Directory Certificate Services server.

• First you’ll want to SSH to your Prime Infrastructure server as well as create a FTP server on your workstation. See my previous blog post for instructions how to do so.
• Generate a new CSR file and answer the information prompts
  • PIServer/admin# ncs key genkey -newdn -csr CSRFile .csr repository defaultRepo
  • The NCS server is running. Changes will take affect on the next server restart Enter the domain name of the server: (the fqdn you'll use to access prime from e.g., prime.company.org) Enter the name of your organizational unit: Enter the name of your organization: Enter the name of your city or locality: Enter the name of your state or province: Enter the two letter code for your country: Generating RSA key
• Copy the CSR to your FTP server
  • PIServer/admin# copy disk: /defaultRepo/ CSRFile.csr ftp://your.ftp.server
• Open your CSR in a text editor, copying the text to your clipboard

At the moment we’re running Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.1 on a Gen1 physical appliance. We’re looking to take the upgrade path from 2.1 all the way up to 3.1 (currently only 3.0.2 is supported on the Gen1 appliance).

First stop, 2.2.

The Gen1 appliance upgrade path isn’t a fun one. It requires that we back up our current application database, wipe our appliance, do a bare-metal install of 2.2, and then restore our application database. Cisco’s documentation for application backup and restore can be found here: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/net_mgmt/prime/infrastructure/2-2/administrator/guide/PIAdminBook/backup_restore.html#72460

After running February 2016’s batch of Microsoft security updates, we started receiving calls from end users about errors when attempting to update their passwords through the Citrix web interface.

While the error indicates the password change failed, it does in fact work, and users can log out and log back in with the new password.

Thankfully it didn’t take long for some savvy Citrix support forums users to pinpoint the issue to a recent patch Microsoft released which changes the api behavior for NetUserChangePassword.