Do you use Cisco AnyConnect VPN? You may want to check up on your build :-O you need at least Release 4.9.00086
Download fixed build here;
https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286281283/type/282364313/release/4.9.00086
So, some of the summer vacation went on relaunching my blog – not quite rocket science but still it is not something I do every day, so I had to do a bit of dusting to get up to speed.
By today your blog need to be SSL/HTTPS, I must admit that I dont quite get why – I could understand it if you were hosting sensitive stuff or allowing people to post sensitive data like creditcard info etc, but for a general technical blog?? But who am I to teach google what to do 😉 So obviously I had to upgrade to HTTPS as well, fortunately these days most providers offer LetsEncrypt certificates so I thought I was in for a breeze…
After enabling a certificate for my site, I browsed to the site just to see:
Your connection to this site is not fully secure
wtf :-O
ok well, a bit of googeling turned up a few SSL checker sites;
https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html?hostname=readmydamnblog.com
This first link will check the certificate, so it is only checking that the certificate itself is valid for your site/url – but still a good place to begin..
Well that part turned out ok.. so nothing wrong with the SSL cert.
The next step, there might be links to your own site on your site that use HTTP and NOT HTTPS, this is bad and will cause the page to fail HTTPS checks in Google Chrome and other browsers..
I found mention of a tool to traverse your site for just such links and tell you which pages on your site have problems.
https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/
Meanwhile though I ended up doing something very simple, I right clicked on my site in google chrome and chose “view page source”
then I searched for “HTTP:” and sure enough the logo on my wordpress blog had a direct link to the logo starting with HTTP: – after fixing that everything is now A-OK.. So my suggestion to you if you run into this problem, inspect the page source looking for HTTP: – this should help you hunt down problem links..
As an ironic twist it turned out that I have a lot of HTTP links, so looks like I will need to do some cleanup of the database to get rid of all those legacy links.. Aint IT grand 😉
So we had this problem, several of our Windows 2008 R2 fileservers were running full and due to technical issues (old hardware) replacing the disks became VERY expensive.
So alternatives, I started to thing – hey, lets create an “ISCSI drive” on a remote datacenter server, mount the ISCSI drive into the directory structure as a mountpoint named “Archive” or something. Now users could put “old” archival data here, thus removing it from the server but still being available – clever 😀 A few issues crept up however, when creating an ISCSI target on a Windows 2008 R2 server this is “terminated” as a VHD file – this proved annoying (eg for backup etc), besides a friend of mine pointed out that they had tried something similar once – sadly if connectivity was sketchy this could cause the fileserver to hang as it was unable to connect to the iscsi target.
My friend however pointed out that he had had success with using “Links”, right – I have heard of these Junction points and symbolic links, but never really found any real good use for it. But it turn out you can create a symbolic link from the directory structure on one server, pointing to a share on a different server.
So eg. O:\ could have a lot of directories, however we also make a Symbolic Link there named “Archive” – if you now perform a dir you will find all the subdirectories, however you will also find O:\Archive which looks just like a directory (the icon gets a screwy arrow but thats all) however it’s not, it is instead a “pointer” to a share on a different server (this share we can easily backup and maintain).
So the command to use is;
MKLINK /D <NAME> \\<SERVERNAME>\Sharename
eg, MKLINK /D HyperVisor5 \\SECRETSERVER\aarhus
HyperVisor5 is the name the directory will get locally the /D indicate it is a directory junction, and the link will point to \\SECRETSERVER\aarhus (aarhus is the share name on the SECRETSERVER)..
Ohh that was easy you say, yeah – well – it did not work 🙁
When a workstation attempted to access a mapped drive (eg. O:\Archive) it would get the above error.
A bit of googleing let to;
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/junfeng/2012/05/07/the-symbolic-link-cannot-be-followed-because-its-type-is-disabled/
And the solution was simple enough, you need to execute this command on the workstation that has the problem;
(the command above the yellow one show the state of your computer)
And now your workstation can browse the directory (which is actually a pointer to a share on a different server) just like it was on the local server.
This should also be controllable via Group Policy, however I have not had the chance to test it yet;
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5c7ffdb9-7066-4bdf-bc7d-eded8db2ce82
The symlink evaluation settings can also be controlled via Group Policy. Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Filesystem and configure “Selectively allow the evaluation of a symbolic link”.