Changing Network Location to Domain

Have you ever restored a VM? Have you done your DR testing by actually doing a full recovery with AD? Did you find you had a couple odd things occur after restore, such as not being able to RDP into your recovered server? Chances are your network profile has changed to public, instead of Domain. This in turn causes certain firewall rules to trigger.

I remember coming across this issue multiple times, especially when people usually want private instead of public and vice versa. So chances are you’ve come across this, telling you to use PowerShell cmdlet to change its setting, which to my guess makes a registry change. The other option they specified was to use the GUI.

Well I find changing local security policies and all that other stuff rather annoying. Soo after a bit more googling I found a really nice answer, which worked and was very simple to implement. Very nicely written and easy to follow by a Evan A Barr. You can view his site here.

To Paraphrase to solution Using Network Connection Properties:

0) by adding a DNS suffix so that NLA can properly locate the domain controller.
1) Go to Network Connections.
2) Go to the properties of of the network adapter in the wrong location.
3) Go to the properties for IPv4.
4) Click the "Advanced..." button.
5) Select the DNS tab.
6) Enter your domain name into the text box for "DNS suffix for this connection:".
7) Disable and then enable the connection to get NLA to re-identify the location.

Windows Shares over SSH tunnel

I am the worst at writing blogs. I seldem get excited enough to write anything. But today…. TODAY! I feel like this is going to be a good blog.

A fanastic blog… anyway, so I moved into a new place, but have my server still running at my old place I run a very lightwheight server from there.
pssssst, it’s really just a router but perfect for hosting a network shares, torrents, web servers (cough this page), ssh and smb (cough this as well)

If you haven’t heard about DDWRT, I’d suggest you check it out here

Anyway, while i use SSH tunnel to manage this router via CLI, I can always tunnel its web management interface port, to my local machine and manage it that way too.
Yes most changes does cause it do it a soft reboot and breaks the connnection, a simple reconnect after a couple minutes useally all it takes.
I figured I’d just forward the servers SMB port just like I do most of my other ports… to my dismay it didn’t work… so I decided to GOOGLE!

As it turns out, there is more tweaking required to do this that I first thought, like disabling the SMB service at start-up, and using a loopback interface..
If you have a Windows share server (SMB) at home and happened to have SSH for management also available, then check this link out!

Bye for now….

Jan 2018 Update

These are always neat tricks to keep in the back of your head, even if your playing around just for fun. I wouldn’t see the real world use for this type of hack today as everything is pretty much OpenVPN or some other VPN solution. Still love my SSH though.

Lucky the link is still active otherwise this post would be as useless as tits on a bull.

Feb 2019 Update

Mind Blow

This is a blog post from someone at the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics… dude, that’s awesome!!!!!!