Out of the box, Umbraco is a well built and pretty fast content management system. However, it is still important you perform some steps to further optimize Umbraco’s performance and loading speed. Here on Sysadmins of the North, I wrote about 11+ tips to optimize Umbraco 7 CMS earlier, and in this post I write about implementing them in Umbraco 8.
3 Ways of blocking sendmail.php on IIS webserver
Here are 3 ways of blocking access to a PHP sendmail.php script on your Windows Server IIS webserver. This comes in handy if a websites on your webserver sends out spam and you need to block access to a script on a specific website or globally in IIS. You can use a web.config file for this purpose, and here is how.
How to extend TinyMCE in Piranha CMS?
Recently I started to use Piranha CMS on a project. Piranha CMS is a .NET 6 compatible content management system and comes with TinyMCE 5 as its editor. I wanted to extend TinyMCE and load additional plugins in my project. Here is how you can do the same.
How to add a trailing slash in Umbraco 8
This article shows you how to add a trailing slash to URL’s in Umbraco 8, using IIS URL Rewrite Module, without breaking the Umbraco backend. Forcing one particular URL avoids duplicate content, which is important for SEO.
Adding VirtIO drivers to Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE)
If you need to add VirtIO drivers to your Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) to recover your Windows virtual machine, here is how. The following steps come in handy if you found out the hard way you don’t see any disks in Windows RE after a hard crash. As have I…
Retrieve SSH public key from Active Directory for SSH authentication
If you want to be able to log on to your Windows Servers through Win32 OpenSSH, you can make use of SSH public key authentication through a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. But if you have tens (hundreds) of servers and/or users, perhaps it’s easier to retrieve user SSH public keys from Active Directory (AD). In this article I’ll explain how.
Install SQL Server cumulative updates silently
Install SQL Server update silent: installing SQL Server cumulative updates is always a cumbersome, and quite daunting task. Unpacking and running the CU installer is a slow process, you have to click through a lot of screens, and it’s hard to get it to install silently. But here is how!
Remove computer object from Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) in PowerShell
Here is a short PowerShell snippet for you to remove a computer object from Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). In an elevated PowerShell session, adjust the following to your environment and execute:
How to add, list and remove IP addresses in Windows Firewall
Yesterday, I showed you how to block IP addresses in Windows Firewall using PowerShell. This comes in handy when blocking IP addresses that are brute-force attacking your servers. In this short post I’ll show you how to bulk add IP addresses in Windows Firewall, list an IP address and how to remove all IP addresses from Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security.
Block brute force attacks on SQL Server, block IP addresses in Windows Firewall using PowerShell
This PowerShell solution blocks IP addresses that are trying to brute force your SQL Server logins, by blocking IP addresses in Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security. For the time being, some manual labor is involved, but it is still manageable. You can use this to create your own solution to block offending IP addresses in SQL Server’s firewall.
Windows Defender: Turn off routine remediation
Long story short: During the transition of antivirus software to Windows Defender Antivirus (WinDefend), I don’t want Windows Defender remediation on threats it might find. Later, when I have more information about potential threats, I can always choose to remediate that threat, e.g. quarantaine or remove it. Unfortunately, there is no PowerShell cmdlet to configure this. Here is how to (temporarily) turn off routine remediation.
How to enable HTTP/3 in Windows Server 2022
With the release of Windows Server 2022, there is now native support for hosting HTTP/3 services. Jeej! In short, here are the few steps you need to perform to enable HTTP/3 in Windows Server 2022. I can’t provide you with full details and how-to’s, as I don’t know your network.
Increase WMI memory to support large volume of queries
Since I started expanding my Zabbix scripts and templates for monitoring Windows Server instances – AD, IIS and SQL Server – I found WMI was failing more and more. WMI stopped working: WmiPrvse.exe would just crash after hitting some memory limit of 512 MB. If you run into the same issue with Windows Management Instrumentation, here is how you can increase WMI Provider Service’s memory quota. Doing so resolved my issues.
How-to fix “Get-MpComputerStatus : The extrinsic Method could not be executed.”
This is how I resolved the error message “Get-MpComputerStatus : The extrinsic Method could not be executed.”, in my specific situation. In my situation, I had Windows Defender Antivirus disabled per GPO (“Turn off Windows Defender Antivirus” in Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Windows Defender Antivirus). And I wanted to enable Windows Defender in a new GPO, on a specific set of computers.