A few years back I wrote, “Find Last Reboot Time in Windows 7, Vista and Windows 2008,” where you could find this info via command prompt. This is an update to that for later versions of Windows using PowerShell. This first way will display how long the network service has been running. Generally this will be very close […]
FREE (or VERY cheap) EC2 Proxy Server – Windows Over Ubuntu Proxy on AWS
Ever been sitting in a hotel (or your home) and tried to watch your favorite sports team on a streaming service, but couldn’t due to the archaic and draconian broadcast licensing agreements which ban in-market online distribution?!? And the name brand hotel chain doesn’t carry the local affiliate for your pennant-chasing team?!? WTF!?! Or, you just wanted to […]
A Few of My Favorite Online Tools
IP Calculator ipcalc takes an IP address and netmask and calculates the resulting broadcast, network, Cisco wildcard mask, and host range. By giving a second netmask, you can design subnets and supernets. It is also intended to be a teaching tool and presents the subnetting results as easy-to-understand binary values. IP Calculator Results. DNS Propagation Checkers whatsmydns.net lets […]
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Official Study Guide: Associate Exam Review
As I posted recently I’ve been using some great resources to prepare for some AWS exams. In my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam review I raved about how good it is in assisting to prepare for the exam. Now I want to talk about the, “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Official Study Guide: Associate Exam,” which is […]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam Review
I’ve been working with AWS for 10 years now and love it more than ever! About four years ago when I first learned of AWS Certifications I went right out and took the Architecting on AWS Associates exam and was able to pass it the first time. When it came time to re-certify a couple years later I […]
Disable TLS on Server 2012 R2 in the Registry with PowerShell
It’s common knowledge that TLS is preferred over SSL because it provides better security, and because an industry-wide push to stop using SSL, use HTTPS exclusively (instead of HTTP), and increase security overall has been underway for a while. But it’s also important to use the latest version of TLS. Fortunately Windows Server 2012 R2 supports all three […]
Shrinking EBS Windows Boot Volume
After migrating my physical server to AWS recently I needed to shrink the boot volume a bit. The original server’s drive was ~1TB, so that’s the size my boot EBS volume was after the migration, but since I only have about 125GB of used space I wanted to reduce the overall volume size to about 150GB. Not surprisingly AWS […]
Migrating Physical Windows Servers to AWS AMI – EC2
Doing What They Say Can’t be Done I’ve had to do this task a few times but because they were separated by a significant amount of time both the methods changed slightly and my memory of the exact steps faded. These are the new-and-improved way to convert a bare metal Windows server (I’m doing 2008 R2, but it […]
HowTo: Install AWS CLI on Both Windows and Linux
Several years ago before the unified AWS CLI was released I wrote about installing the EC2 command line tools. Now it’s time to update that. It goes without saying that over the decade Amazon has been providing cloud services their interfaces and tools have matured greatly (along with their overall offerings). Early on Amazon didn’t even have web […]
Install PowerShell v5 on Windows Server 2008 R2 or 2012 R2
Prior to updating to PowerShell version 5 make sure to be running the latest version of .NET Framework (.NET 4.6.1 as of this writing). See Checking .NET Versions. Check Current Version of PowerShellRun either $Host.Version or $PSVersionTable.PSVersionInstall latest version of .NET. PowerShell 5 is part of Windows Management Framework (WMF) version 5 and can be downloaded from Microsoft […]