• Tracking down Failed Login Attempts in Active Directory

    I had a recent experience with a client where a user account was getting locked out but the but the logs on the domain controller weren’t very helpful. Basically besides telling us the account was locked out they did nothing, no location, nothing. After quite a bit of research on google I found this blog…


  • Who do you use for upstream DNS?

    There are so many good options for upstream DNS other than your internet provider I figured I would ask everyone, please post a comment below. Here are some of my favorites but its by no means an inclusive list. Wikipedia has a longer list here Public Recursive Name Server . My current favorite is 1.1.1.1…


  • SQL 2016 Won’t Send Mail

    I’ve come across this problem a few times and always end up googling it so I figured I would make a post for my own benefit and also to help anyone else running into the issue. Basically the RTM version of SQL Server 2016 has a bug in it where it doesn’t reference the correct…


  • Cisco Firepower Threat Defense Packet Flow

    Early in my days of learning Cisco FTD it could be hard to get my mind around how packets were flowing and where and when they were dropped. Cisco has some good images showing the packet flow but the one below by Todd Lammle is even better. Posted with permission from the author Todd Lammle…


  • SQL DB Execute to a Role

    Have you ever needed a less privileged user to execute Stored Procedures? Me too. Here is how you do it. Run this against the database — Create a db_executor role CREATE ROLE db_executor — Grant execute rights to the new role GRANT EXECUTE TO db_executor Then add the db_executor role to the users you want to be…