Who accepts #Bitcoin? (Infographic)

Many people who are new to bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general only see the value of bitcoin as a store of value, or investment opportunity. No doubt this is due to the amazing bull run that bitcoin saw in 2017. Those who have been in the space a lot longer remember a time when bitcoin was also used as a means of exchange. To tell the truth, it still is, although high network fees have turned people onto other means of exchange in the cryptocurrency space. Coins such as Litecoin, or Bitcoin Cash have faster transactions, and lower fees. That being said, there are still quite a few organizations that accept payment via bitcoin. Here is a handy infographic that shows who accepts bitcoin! [Via 16Bes...

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Top 10 Most Secret Data Breaches in the Cloud

Cloud systems are considered a safer place than on-premises models, but you still can’t be completely sure of the integrity of your data. Microsoft’s Security and Intelligence report revealed that the number of cyberattacks on clouds increased by 300% in 2017. When companies move their business to the cloud, they are at risk of compromising their sensitive data and losing their customer’s loyalty and business reputation. That’s why so many companies would like to hide the cases of data breaches in the cloud during many years after incidents occurred. Here is a list of most secret data breaches that evidently shows the importance of protecting clouds against cyber attacks. 1. FedEx In February this year, Kromtech Security Center disclosed...

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How to turn off Focused Inbox in Outlook

My company uses Office365, and I absolutely love it. I've managed in-house Exchange servers in my previous jobs, and having done that and having used Office365, I don't know if I could ever go back. That being said, the other day I noticed that Office365 pushed out an update for my Outlook client that enabled what they call the Focused Inbox. If you are unfamiliar with that, here is a description from their support site: Focused Inbox separates your inbox into two tabs—Focused and Other. Your most important emails are on the Focused tab while the rest remain easily accessible—but out of the way—on the Other tab. My problem with this is that Outlook is the one determining what is important for me, and what isn't. I noticed that I wasn't seeing...

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Office365: Your machine isn't set up for Information Rights Management (IRM)

The other day one of the executives at my day job sent out his monthly internal report via email. We have a rights protected message feature enabled when anyone puts a certain keyword in the subject line. Since these internal reports are confidential, the executive used the keyword. Ever since setting this up, I haven't had any issues opening these files until the other day. I recently got a new laptop, so maybe that's the issue, but for some reason on this particular day when I went to open his email message I was greeted with the following error: Your machine isn't set up for Information Rights Management (IRM). To set up IRM, sign in to Office, open and existing IRM protected message or document, or contact your help desk. WTF...

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Science with my son: Mentos and Soda Experiment

A few weekends ago my son and I decided to do the good ol' Mentos and Soda experiment for his weekly YouTube show, "The Adventures of Brizzle Fo' Shizzle"! It was a lot of fun, and we obviously made a huge mess out in the yard. If you've never dropped Mentos into a jug of cola, you are seriously missing out on life! Pro tip: It works best with diet cola according to "Myth Busters". ...

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Corrupt OpenVAS PDF's in Ubuntu?

Yesterday I wrote about how I recently setup an OpenVAS/Greenbone server on Ubuntu, and how the guide I referenced for the install missed a few steps. Well, I found another one! After getting reports to generate correctly, one thing I noticed was that exporting to PDF didn't work. I mean, I could download a file with a PDF extension, but when I opened it with my PDF reader, I got an error message saying it was corrupt! What the hell man? Well, searching around I did find this OpenVAS Wiki post talking about how to fix this, but it only gives examples of how to fix it in CentOS. Where's the Ubuntu love guys? Well, to fix it in Ubuntu you just need to install the texlive-latex-extra package. You can do that by running: sudo...

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OpenVAS/Greenbone Empty Reports in Ubuntu

The other day I stood up an OpenVAS server so I could run internal vulnerability testing in my environment. If you haven't heard of OpenVAS, here is a description from their page: OpenVAS is a framework of several services and tools offering a comprehensive and powerful vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management solution. The framework is part of Greenbone Networks' commercial vulnerability management solution from which developments are contributed to the Open Source community since 2009. Well, I followed this tutorial on how to install OpenVAS in Ubuntu. However, after I was done and I ran some scans I noted that all of my reports were empty! Any of the reports I clicked on said the following: 0 results  Empty reports...

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Free Utility To Analyze Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) in Windows

For some reason over the last month or so, my company has been experiencing a random string of Blue Screens of Death (BSODs). It turned out to be caused by a certain Microsoft update for Windows 10, but during the troubleshooting process my desktop tech mentioned a tool that I had never heard of before. It's called BlueScreenView! From their page: BlueScreenView scans all your minidump files created during 'blue screen of death' crashes, and displays the information about all crashes in one table. For each crash, BlueScreenView displays the minidump filename, the date/time of the crash, the basic crash information displayed in the blue screen (Bug Check Code and 4 parameters), and the details of the driver or module that possibly caused the...

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Infographic - 67 Insane Facts About #Bitcoin

Since December 2017's epic high of $20,000 per bitcoin, the cryptocurrency has been in and out of the toilet as far as pricing goes. If you watch the news, this may very well be the only fact you know about bitcoin. Many of us have faith that it will reach and exceed those highs again. It's inevitable really. In the meantime though, here is a very insightful infographic that you can share with those nocoiners, and FUD spreaders! Enjoy! [Via Bitcoin Pla...

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What is Redis? | Why and When to use Redis?

The other day my development team's Solutions Architect came to me and asked me to deploy Ubuntu based Redis servers in our QA environment so that the developers could test using Redis for session state instead of logging to a Microsoft SQL database. This was their solution to poor performance issues in our applications. Apparently the session state transactions were causing a bottleneck in Microsoft SQL. Anyway, I had never heard of Redis so I found this video on YouTube that explains what Redis is and why you might want to use Redis: Also shown in the video, here is a description of what Redis is from their website: Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache and message broker. It...

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How To Resize a Storage Repository (SR) in XenServer

The other weekend I got a disk space alert from my backup server in my Arizona data center. This happens occasionally. Since this is a VM, I usually just increase the virtual disk, then extend the drive in Windows. No big deal. Well this time, I couldn't extend the virtual drive without first increasing the size of my storage repository (SR). Well, increasing the size of a storage repository in XenServer isn't as easy as in VMWare, but it's still not that difficult. You just have to SSH into your XenServers to do it, and it only takes 11 steps really: On your SAN, extend the volume/LUN SSH into your master node Run xe sr-list name-label=<your SR name you want to resize>. Note the uuid of the SR. Run pvscan | grep <the uuid you...

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Modern free alternative to Cliffs Notes

When I was in high school and junior high (Yes, I went to junior high and not a middle school) like just about every kid, I had to read lots of classic novels for language arts class. Well, let's be honest, I was assigned the task of reading the book, but I never did. No, like quite a lot of kids at the time we would get our hands on Cliffs Notes, usually from the book store in the mall, and do all of our related assignments based off of the summaries from Cliffs Notes. Most of the time, it had all the answers we needed, without having to waste our time reading boring books. Is that cheating? Maybe, but I certainly didn't care. Well the other day my daughter was given a reading assignment for a book called Hush, but the trouble was that...

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Free Open Source Fork of Citrix XenServer?

The other day I wrote about where you can download older versions of Citrix XenServer since they removed a lot of features from their free version in 7.3, and then removed access to older version to force people to upgrade... Dick move right? Well, apparently I'm not the only person pissed off by this. A whole group of developers decided to launch a new project called XCP-ng or Xen Cloud Platform Next Generation! Their goal? To provide a community driven version of Citrix's  XenServer that, unlike the original open source Xen Project, will look and feel the same as Citrix's version, along with the ease of use.... At least that's what it looks like to me. Check out their video: Their project page actually lists the following as their goal: The main goal is to be able to enjoy Xenserver...

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#Bitcoin is "Crashing" Again... Why We're Not Worried

People seem to be worried again that bitcoin has started dropping.  But we are not worried, and neither should you be.  Alessio Rastani explains why. ...

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Why does Google Chrome think I'm in India?

I've noticed a weird issue in Google Chrome lately, and that is whenever I type a search term in the address bar, the results come from google.co.in. If you didn't know, that is the URL for Google in India... I however most certainly don't live in India... Well, after searching around I found out that quite a few others have noticed the same thing. The best solution I can find to make it stop is to do the following in Chrome: Go to Settings > Manage Search Engines Scroll down to the Add a new search engine box Enter Google NCR for the name Enter Google NCR_ for the keyword type In the URL use https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=cr Set that as your default search provider If you are wondering,...

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VMs Missing in XenCenter When One or More XenServers Are Unavailable

The other night was one of those nights from hell that inevitably come up once in a while. This occasion was in one of my day job's lower tier environments where we run everything in a XenServer cluster. Well, this particular night was a power maintenance night for our data center, and two of our XenServer only had single power supplies. Well, if you guessed that the two with single power supplies shut down, you guessed right. There were some other issues as well, that lead to this next problem, but I won't bore you with the details. You're probably here because of what happened after I finally got the other nodes back online. What happened once I got some of my other equipment back online, and with only three out of five XenServers still...

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How to fix "The VDI is not available" error in XenServer

I had an epic shit storm of an issue the other night with one of my XenServer clusters at my day job. I won't get into too many boring details, but long story short is that two out of my five XenServers were offline, and I had to tell my cluster for forcefully shut down a few of the VMs that the cluster thought were still running on the offline hosts. That was the easy part. Powering up the VMs was not easy. When I tried to power the VMs back on to run on one of the live nodes, I got the following error: the vdi is not available Man! What kind of shit is that?! Well, to fix it is actually not that hard. Just kind of a pain. What you need to do is detach the virtual disk from the VM in XenCenter. Then grab the UUID of the LUN where the virtual...

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Where can you download older versions of XenServer?

Ever since Citrix announced the good features they were pulling from the free edition of XenServer starting in version 7.3, many users of the free XenServer were extremely pissed! For those of you who don't know what got pulled from the free version, here is the list: Dynamic Memory Control Xen Storage Motion Active Directory Integration Role Based Access Control High Availability GPU Pass-Through Site Recovery Manager (Disaster Recovery) XenCenter Rolling Pool Upgrade Wizard Maximum Pool Size Restricted To 3 Hosts (existing larger pools will continue to work, but no new host joins will be permitted) Pretty much, everything you've grown to love right? Well, if you don't think that takes the cake, they went ahead and restricted access to older...

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How to get more Facebook page likes for free

You wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the Bauer-Power Facebook page that I actually have quite a big following. That's because the Bauer-Power the Tech Blog gets most of its traffic from Google, so I'm not terribly concerned with 'Likes' on Facebook, although I would love for you to follow Bauer-Power if you find this post useful! I do, on the other hand, have a political Facebook page that I manage called Mainwashed that has a fairly decent following. In the early days of the page, I paid for Facebook advertising to get more followers, but I haven't done that in a few years since Facebook has squashed our reach with their newer algorithms. That being said, I did find a way to get more followers for free, and relatively fast! This...

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Which Is More Successful? Google or Apple?

In this episode of the Infragraphics Show, they try to figure out who is more successful between Google and Apple? They look at which one has the most potential to be the first trillion dollar company, and look at how both Google (Alphabet) and Apple got started. ...

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How to explain #Bitcoin to your grandparents (Infographic)

Interestingly, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a really foreign concept to many older folks. Millennials seem to just get it, probably because it was a technology created early in their lifetime so it just makes sense. Anyway, if you are a bitcoin enthusiast, and have been having a difficult time explaining it to your parents or grandparents, check on this infographic: ...

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Easy to setup free open source backup server

The other day I was looking for a new backup solution. I wanted one that I could use for my day job potentially, and also perhaps as a side business for local businesses around me. You see, I found that through VPS Dime, I can get a 2TB Linux VPS server for as low as $28 per month! If I setup a cloud based backup server on it, I could charge small businesses a lower monthly fee than Mozy charges, and still make a profit! I digress... Anyway, one open source backup solution I found was really easy to setup, so I thought I'd share it with you. It's called UrBackup! Here are features from their page: Full and incremental image and file backups: Whole partitions can be saved as well as single directories Clients for Windows, Linux and Max...

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