Fortinet Firewall Wisdom
It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged here. This is about FortiGate firewalls. There’s a guy out there who calls himself the “Fortinet Guru”. You can find his blog here.
I view Mike’s posts on a regular basis because his Fortinet brain is wide with knowledge and deep with experience. He also imparts a more human vibe to cybersecurity.
Visit Mike’s YouTube channel if you work on Fortinet Unified Threat Management products. You’ll find a lot of good info and sage advice.
The following short vid is one I use as a bedrock for making decisions about firewall configuration & maintenance. Learn! –B
Myth: Macs Never Get Malware or Viruses
MacOS’s 14.64% overall market share among desktop operating systems (Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide) continues to grow and with that, hopefully the stupid notion that they are immune to Malware or Virus attacks disappears with that growth. True, Big Sur is yet another tightening of the security belt and good on Apple for those changes.
I guess all those years of being first-to-fall during hack-athons made Apple take some notice
To VERY loosely quote Jordan B. Peterson (he was talking about hell) …there’s this idea that operating systems are a bottomless pit of bugs and backdoors and no matter how good you are at patching those flaws there’s some son-of-a-bitch that will come along and makes things infinitely worse! …and for no other reason than because they CAN.
So get that stupid, stupid, STUPID idea out of your head right now. No operating system exists without people out there who want nothing more than to WRECK YOUR DAY. And as your market share grows, so does the number of malevolent sonsabitches that want to spew their own brand of hatred upon you.
Example. Apple’s new M-series processors…They’re damned awesome. They’re in a closed system with no worries about legacy OS stuff. This makes optimizing the operating system’s code for these processors much easier. Intel procs are basically general purpose. They live in an open world. All Apple products live in a closed eco-system. This gives them a lot of advantages. One of those advantages is a tighter, more secure OS without compromising too much processing power.
Apple’s new M-series procs are damned awesome
Well…in the shadows you see MacOS’s rising market share bringing out the haters. And haters gotta hate, don’t they? And the haters just wanted to get the attention of Mac users to remind them who is REALLY in charge. Buwaaaaaaahahahaha.
And haters gotta hate, don’t they?
So, here’s the latest and greatest news on this front: “Mysterious malware infects 30,000 Mac computers“
Now this particular malware doesn’t do ANYTHING HARMFUL…except screw with your mind. It’s infecting new M1 Macs and all it does is say, “Hello World” and “You Did It!” But that’s the point, isn’t it?
If there’s an unarmed man in the dark corner of your room just whispering at you…you still quake because you know what happens when he actually has a knife or gun in his hand and starts doing damage.
Well…I hope you keep your Macs updated with the latest patches. Otherwise, you’re dead meat
…And stop feeling immune from it you frigging MORON — OMG
B
On Removing .Net 4.5 from a Windows Server…
I had an occasion where all things pointed to .NET 4.5 being corrupted and needed to be reinstalled. In my case, MMC kept crashing on me no matter what I did.
If you remove .NET 4.5 from your server, after the requisite restart, you’ll be presented with a handy little thing called a Command Window…aaaaaaaand nothing else. So crack your knuckles and get ready to do some typin’ ladies & gents…
The only way to get the GUI back and Powershell, for that matter, is to run the following DISM commands from the handy Command Window.
DISM being the Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool.
With thanks to Sanup Kumar Bishla in his LinkedIn article p
Type the following two commands and wait for the completion of each…then type in the third and final command to force a restart; When you come back up, you’ll need to invoke a few PowerShell commands before you have your GUI back!
- DISM.exe /Online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFx4 /all
- DISM.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell /all
- shutdown /r
…now that you’re back… Press CNTL-ALT-DEL and bring up the Task Manager.
NOTE: If you’re RDP’ing into the server, type CNTL-ALT-END instead.
- Once Task Manager Opens select File and Run new task
- You should now see the Create new task menu, type PowerShell.exe and select OK
- NOTE: PowerShell prompt should now be open
- Run the following commands in PowerShell:
- Install-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Shell (this one took a while to complete for me!)
- Install-WindowsFeature Server-Gui-Mgmt-Infra
- Once the GUI Shell is installed, you will need to restart the server with the following command:
- Restart-Computer
…when it comes up you should be back in business. This should convey the lesson that it really helps being familiar with the Command Line Interface (CLI) and PowerShell especially. It can pull your ass out of some serious situations, for sure!
A GUI-Only SysAdmin isn’t really a SysAdmin, IMHO.
I hope this helps you out!
B
Garbage In – Garbage Out.
Garbage-In – Garbage Out. This is a statement meant to imply that if you input faulty data, the result will be faulty as well. Asked my Pixel if it was going to rain today because I was seeing some pretty ominous clouds above. Here is Google’s answer at 8:15am…
And now, at 9:09am it is raining. So, of course, I just HAD to ask it once again…
…I realize that Google is probably relying on a weather service for the info…and of course, all weather reports lead back to the U.S. Government. Why should I be surprised?
I honestly didn’t know whether to post this here on the tech blog because it deals with Google Assistant …on laughingbrian.wordpress.com because my first inclination is to laugh …or constitutionalbrian.wordpress.com because the US Gov’t has veered so far off its original mandate that it can’t get a weather report right…and it shouldn’t be doing the DAMNED WEATHER ANYWAY!!
sigh…
B
GPU prices are falling, and you should buy now
[Note from Brian: I have no idea if this person is paranoid or not… Sounds a bit on the paranoid side. Still, I think it’s good advice to buy a 1080 card before Nvidia’s 11 series hits. I think it’s likely Nvidia will do it’s damnedest to keep the 1080’s price high by reducing supply… Just sayin’]
GPU prices are falling, and you should buy now on
Microsoft Is Officially Not the Windows Company Anymore
Microsoft Is Officially Not the Windows Company Anymore
https://search.app.goo.gl/73qLV
Shared from my Google feed
Intel Invented the SSD Killer of the Future, and It’s So Fast and So Expensive
Intel Invented the SSD Killer of the Future, and It’s So Fast and So Expensive
https://search.app.goo.gl/CqXA
Shared from my Google feed
Microsoft’s compiler-level Spectre fix shows how hard this problem will be to solve
Microsoft’s compiler-level Spectre fix shows how hard this problem will be to solve
https://search.app.goo.gl/azbu
Shared from my Google feed
Researchers Find New Ways to Exploit Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities in Modern CPUs
Researchers Find New Ways to Exploit Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities in Modern CPUs
https://search.app.goo.gl/mG3c
Shared from my Google feed
Linus Torvalds Speaks on Intel Fix for Meltdown/Spectre
Wow…great article for most non-techies. The last paragraph echoes my sentiments about if it weren’t for these hard- ass, old-school coders, we’d be up Shit Creek.
Technical Brian 