Ramblings on IT and Security

Category: Windows (Page 1 of 3)

Fixing Packer + Proxmox template build failures: “can’t lock file … got timeout”

While automating my Proxmox environment with Packer, most of the workflow worked flawlessly: Ubuntu autoinstall, cloud-init, SSH provisioning, and qemu-guest-agent all behaved exactly as expected. But every build consistently failed at the very last step, converting the VM into a template, which was very annoying.

Despite the VM installing perfectly, Proxmox refused to stop it cleanly and returned a persistent lock-related error. This led to a surprisingly long troubleshooting process, which eventually revealed a simple root cause: stale lock files left behind from earlier interrupted builds……sigh

In this post, I’ll share the exact error, the steps I went through to diagnose it, and how cleaning up these old lock files immediately restored stable, repeatable builds, it’s been a few very long days…

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PKI – Part 6: Demystifying the CAPolicy.inf file

Ever heard of the capolicy.inf file? It’s like a digital instruction manual for a Certificate Authority (CA) server. It pre-configures the CA and has a say in how certificates are set up or renewed. In other words, it’s a behind-the-scenes helper that ensures everything is governed with digital certificates. In this blog post, I’ll break down what this file does and why it matters in plain and simple terms.

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Part 5 – PKI Best Practices: Creating Unique Object Identifiers (OIDs)

Introduction: Why OIDs matter in PKI

When building or managing a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), precision and uniqueness are not optional, they’re very essential. Don’t be one of many, be your unique self! One key element that reflects this is the Object Identifier (OID). OIDs are globally unique values used to identify everything from certificate policies and application purposes to custom certificate extensions and cryptographic algorithms.

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Enable RDP hardware acceleration on a Linux VM in Microsoft Hyper-V

How to pass through a GPU and optimize remote performance in Ubuntu

Running a GPU-accelerated remote desktop on a Linux virtual machine (VM) in Microsoft Hyper-V can significantly improve performance for graphical applications, GPU intensive workloads, and even remote testing. However, Hyper-V does not support full PCI passthrough like VMware or Proxmox. Instead, it provides Discrete Device Assignment (DDA), which allows passing a GPU directly to a VM.

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Step-by-Step Guide to Windows Event Forwarding and NTLMv1 Monitoring

Did you know that Windows has had a built-in capability to function as a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system for years, provided you stay within the Windows ecosystem? This powerful feature, known as Windows Event Forwarding (WEF), allows you to centralize event logs from multiple Windows machines, giving you a comprehensive view of your network’s activities.

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Mastering AppLocker: Security Group Exceptions

I’ll promise to keep this blog post short—well, shorter than usual (hopefully). Last week, I worked on a project involving application allow listing. In the Windows ecosystem, this can be achieved using Windows AppLocker. While AppLocker has been around for quite some time, it’s only recently become available on Windows 11 Professional. Previously, it was an exclusive feature for Enterprise versions.

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