Mike Tabor

Enable DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted SNI in Firefox

January 2, 2019 Security

In Firefox 62, Mozilla has added two new features called DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR). The ideal behind each of these features is to improve user privacy and improved performance. DNS has typically been sent over insecure HTTP allowing anyone on the wire, such as your ISP, to monitor what sites you are visiting.

Below we’ll look at how to enable TRR you can tell Firefox to make DoH it’s first choice and use the system DNS as a fallback option.

The second feature we will be enable is Encrypted SNI, which prevents others from intercepting the TLS SNI extension and use it to determine what websites you are browsing.

How to fix Veeam Backup after installing vCenter 6.7 Update 1

November 1, 2018January 23, 2019 Tools

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After upgrading vCenter 6.7 to vCenter 6.7 Update 1 in one of my environments, it was noticed that Veeam backups where failing with the error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

I’m running Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 U3a and after doing some digging around, it seems there is an API change in vSphere 6.7 Update 1 that is causing the backups to fail.

While Veeam plans to resolve this issue with their new Update 4 version coming out soon, there is a very simple work around thanks to this forum post.

How to update VMware ESXi 6.7 to 6.7 Update 1

October 30, 2018January 2, 2019 VMware

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To go along with the newly released VMware vCenter 6.7 Update 1 release, comes VMware ESXi 6.7 Update 1 as well.

As you might expect with an Update 1 release there are a number of patches, fixes and new additions with ESXi 6.7 U1. If you haven’t already seen, check out the release notes here.

Below are two ways to easily upgrade your ESXi 6.0-6.7 hosts to ESXi 6.7 U1 using the command line or by using VMware Update Manager.
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Upgrade VCSA 6.5 to VCSA 6.7 Update 1

October 29, 2018October 30, 2018 VMware

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VMware vCenter 6.7 U1 has recently been released. Last week I posted how to upgrade VCSA 6.7 to 6.7 Update 1, this post will walk you though upgrading VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 to VCSA 6.7 Update 1!

When doing a VCSA version upgrade the upgrade process is much different, than going from say 6.7 to 6.7 U1. When going from 6.5 to 6.7 the upgrade is actually broken up into two stages.

The first stage involves deploying a brand new vCenter 6.7 appliance. Then the second stage will copy the data from your 6.5 VCSA into the newly deployed 6.7 VCSA from stage 1.

Update vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 to 6.7 Update 1

October 26, 2018October 30, 2018 VMware

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VMware has released vCenter Server 6.7 Update 1 and with comes with a number changes.

One most notable change is the feature complete HTML5 vSphere client. The vSphere client in vCenter 6.7 Update 1 now includes the ability to manage:

Host profiles
Auto deploy
Full vSphere Update Manager (VUM)
A new dark theme
and vCenter High Availability.

That’s no where near all of the changes though, there are many more changes and updates in the 6.7 Update 1 update. Be sure to read the full release notes here.

In this post we’ll see just how easy it is to upgrade from VCSA 6.7 to VCSA 6.7 Update 1 in just a couple steps!

How to upgrade ESXi 6.5 to ESXi 6.7

August 24, 2018January 1, 2019 VMware

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VMware released ESXi 6.7 a little while ago, but it’s only been here recently have I started deploying it in my home and work lab environments. Below are two ways to easily upgrade your ESXi 6.5 hosts to ESXi 6.7 using the command line or by using the VMware ESXi offline bundle.

Note: As of the time of writing (8/24/2018) there are no supported upgrade paths from ESXi 6.5 U2 to ESXi 6.7.

How to manually delete NetApp SnapMirror snapshots

June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 VMware

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The other day, one of our volumes in the lab environment filled up. This volume has a couple large VM’s on it, coupled with a couple different Veeam backup jobs running using the native Veeam backup methods as well as using NetApp snap mirror to snapshot the volume and then using Veeam to ship it out to Azure.

At any rate the volume filled up to the point where vCenter wasn’t allowing me to migrate VM’s off the datastore. I really didn’t want to expand the volume just so I could move VM’s off of it.

Instead, I decided to delete some of the older proof of concept snapshots from SnapMirror. Below are the quick and easy steps to clear up some un-used snapshots and free up some space on the datastore.

How to host a static website using AWS S3 and Cloudflare

May 30, 2018November 3, 2021 AWS

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I’ve been noticing a previous post about how to host a static site using various AWS services has been gaining in popularity.

Most recently a blog post by Thom Greene (@tbgree00) had mentioned the previous article and while all the steps in the previous post are accurate and works – I wanted to share how I now host static websites using AWS S3 and Cloudflare.

How to fix VMware Converter error “FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored”

April 24, 2018 VMware

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While moving some VM’s from Hyper-V to VMware using VMware Converter a VM failed to convert with the error: FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored.

FAILED: The VSS snapshots cannot be stored because there is not enough space on the source volumes or because the source machine does not have any NTFS volumes. Error code: 2147754783 (0x8004231F).

Come to find out the System Reserved partition was full. Our soon to be retired Appassure backup application was nice enough to fill up the volume.

Luckily Appassure is being replaced by Veeam and fixing the above VMware Converter error is an easy fix.

How-to fix VMware Converter error FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.

April 10, 2018 VMware

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I was recently tasked with migrating a Hyper-V machine to our VMware environment. However, each time VMware Converter was ran, the task would fail at 97% with an error “FAILED: Unable to find the system volume, reconfiguration is not possible.“.

Looking further into the virtual machine there were a number of concerns I had on the VM. One such issue which I believe might be causing the above error, is that the system volume drive was on drive 0 while the “C:” drive was on drive 1. Whereas these are typically on the same drive in most Windows installs.

Below are the steps I took to fix this VM and made the migration from Hyper-V to VMware a success.