Windows still includes some legacy protocols that pose significant security risks. This applies to SMBv1/CIFS, which Microsoft is gradually phasing out. While it is still present in new Windows versions, it is disabled by default. The audit feature can detect SMBv1 requests and assess whether the protocol is still required.

We have just added an experimental feature to 4sysops. At the end of every blog article, you will find a chatbot that enables you to ask questions about the article. You may use this feature if you need further clarification or want to gain additional information not covered in the article.

The announced support for SMB over QUIC in all editions of Windows Server 2025 marks a significant advancement for the file services role. In addition, the upcoming LTSC server release brings several new mechanisms designed to enhance the security of traditional SMB over TCP or RDMA.

Explore Pulseway 9.4 remote monitoring and management's latest features: enhanced reporting, advanced automation, improved patching, and upgraded remote control for efficient IT management.

GUI solutions for Ansible, such as Red Hat’s Ansible Tower and PagerDuty’s RunDeck, come with a significant license cost, whereas the free versions are limited in features and complicated to install. Developed with ease of use in mind, Semaphore provides a GUI for Ansible with a set of powerful features.

Sometimes, the remote extensions that are installed by Microsoft Visual Code (VS Code) on remote systems can consume high amounts of CPU usage, making it difficult to use the server efficiently. However, my script can help limit the CPU usage of VS Code on a remote server.

Pulumi is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solution similar to Terraform. One advantage of Pulumi is that it allows DevOps engineers to use familiar programming languages to define, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure. This post demonstrates how to deploy an EC2 instance with Pulumi.

This post will guide you in debugging containerized apps running in Docker using Visual Studio (VS) Code.

LM Studio is a free tool that allows you to run an AI on your desktop using locally installed open-source Large Language Models (LLMs). It features a browser to search and download LLMs from Hugging Face, an in-app Chat UI, and a runtime for a local server compatible with the OpenAI API. You can use this server to set up a development environment before deploying a more extensive LLM system or even run your ChatGPT clone without sharing your corporate data with third parties.

Azure Functions often require access to sensitive information. It is a security risk to store credentials in code or configuration files. Thus, protecting sensitive information like connection strings, API keys, or passwords is crucial. This is where Azure Key Vault comes in, offering secure and centralized storage for all your secrets. In this article, I will explain how to retrieve secrets from the Key Vault within an Azure Function using PowerShell.

Before deployment, Microsoft ISO's install .wim or custom images should be updated. With the DISM module in PowerShell, you can add .msu updates, apps, and drivers to a Windows image offline without the need to boot it up.

Tuning Ceph performance is crucial to ensure that your Ceph storage cluster operates efficiently and meets the specific requirements of your workload. As Ceph installations, both in software and hardware, are upgraded or as your workload changes, the default tunables that were optimal at one time may now be obsolete or counterproductive.

In my previous post on the OpenAI API, I introduced a simple chatbot that demonstrated how to interact with the API. In this post, I will take it a step further by showing you how to create your own ChatGPT app. You may be wondering why you need your own ChatGPT app when you can use the OpenAI web interface.

The free Graphical Network Simulator-3 (GNS3) allows for the planning and practical simulation of networks and their topology. Thanks to Dynamips, it also supports integrating images of Cisco IOS. GNS3 can be integrated with physical hardware, enabling, for instance, the testing of monitoring solutions.

Before deploying to clients, you should update a Windows image with the latest patches and customize it to meet their needs. Depending on the deployment method, you need to provide the WIM archive on a bootable ISO file. This can be created using the tools from the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK).

You can manage Docker images and containers directly within Visual Studio Code (VS Code) with Microsoft's Docker extension. This article walks you through adding Docker files to a Workspace, creating a containerized application environment, and explains how to build and run Docker containers directly from the VS Code interface.

Managed identities provide secure authentication for resources accessing other resources in Azure without requiring sensitive information such as secrets, credentials, and certificates to be handled. Microsoft Entra ID manages these identities, enabling applications to obtain tokens for authentication. In this post, I will provide an example that illustrates how to use system and user-assigned managed identities with PowerShell.

If you want to centrally manage proxy settings for the Mozilla browser in a network, a Group Policy is available. Unlike Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, Firefox cannot only inherit the proxy configuration from Windows but can also receive it directly via GPO.

Security Onion is an open-source platform for threat hunting, security monitoring, and log management. It aggregates free tools such as Kibana, Elastic Fleet, InfluxDB, CyberChef, and Suricata. The solution provides access to these tools via a web console. I'll demonstrate how it can be used for analyzing Windows logs.