Latest Posts
VMware Workstation: “‘MonitorLoop’ power on failed.”
Are you trying to power on a virtual machine on your ESXi host and VMware Workstation is telling you, “Unable to change virtual machine power state: Module ‘MonitorLoop’ power on failed.” There are two reasons you’d be seeing this. Your datastore is running out of disk space You recently experienced…
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A Belated Review of “SEC573: Automating Information Security With Python”
Over the 20 or so years I’ve been writing code I’d never taken a class in a language. As a web developer (PHP), software engineer (Perl), or SysAdmin (bash, Python), I’d simply Googled my way to competency. My personal journey into IT was through the U.S. Army when the Army…
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A Tale of Two PoCs or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Honeypot
Direct calls to my mobile from the branch chief, Jim, were recent occurrences, as COVID-19 teleworking efforts dragged into their 6th week and day-to-day operations at my cyber defense employer continued to transform around a remote workforce. The phone call was about an e-mail sent 20 minutes earlier from the…
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“Cards Against Humanity” Remotely
I am typing this for my friends who have responded to my call on social media for a good old fashioned game of (socially distant) Cards Against Humanity. What follows are the requirements to get everyone up on a knock-off game. Requirements: Proficiency with Zoom (only the host needs a…
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Steam Crashes When Launching in Linux Mint
I recently tried to launch Steam on my Linux Mint daily driver to experience a Dungeons & Dragons throwback with Baldur’s Gate. A window popped up to check for updates and seemed to progress normally until it crashed. There was no feedback received, save from unhelpful errors inside /var/log/syslog. Solution…
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Trick certbot into auto-configuring Amazon Linux 2
I use Let’s Encrypt to enable SSL/TLS encryption on all my websites. It’s brain-dead simple to configure with the EFF’s companion certbot tool and has gone a long way into the massive increase in HTTPS-by-default across the web. Unfortunately, certbot is not as familiar with the distant relative of the…
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PHP Warning: require_once(Mail.php): failed to open stream
This one is pretty simple but sometimes frustrating to troubleshoot because the error below has you hunting for a file called Mail.php somewhere in your document root. Spoiler alert: it’s totally not there and never will be. Maybe this is the first PHP mail form you’ve built on this server…
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How to Copy a Lot of Files With rsync
In order to add a new drive to my Linux desktop for a new /home partition, I needed to copy a lot of files to an external USB drive. The directory was large and had over a decade’s worth of content. cp -rp wasn’t going to work. I wanted speed,…
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Can’t Connect to Remote MongoDB
Here’s a quick one for you this fine Sunday afternoon. If you have a brand new install of MongoDB on a remote server, and you’re trying to connect to it with MongoDB Compass but you keep getting the following error: MongoDB not running on the provided host and port Then…
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Hacking Windows 7 Professional Edition, SP2
Since taking the SANS SEC560 Network Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking course earlier this summer, I’ve spent most of my time studying for the GIAC Penetration Tester (GPEN) exam, rather than practicing the skills I learned in the course. Book learning versus practical skills. After taking my second practice exam…
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