HPE Networking expert level certifications

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A couple of days ago, I took the HP0-Y47 exam “Deploying HP FlexNetwork Core Technologies”. It was one of two required exams to achive the HPE ASE – Data Center Network Integrator V1, and the HP ASE – FlexNetwork Integrator V1 certification. It was a long planned upgrade to my HP ATP certification, and it is a necessary certification for the HPE partner status of my employer.

You might find it confusing that I’m talking about an HP ASE and a HPE ASE. That is not a typo. The HP ASE was released prior the HP/ HPE split. The HPE ASE was released after the split in HP and HPE. read more

vSphere Distributed Switch health check fails on HPE Comware switches

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cre8tive / pixelio.de

During the replacement of some VMware ESXi hosts at a customer, I discovered a recurrent failure of the vSphere Distributed Switch health checks. A VLAN and MTU mismatch was reported. On the physical side, the ESXi hosts were connected to two HPE 5820 switches, that were configured as an IRF stack. Inside the VMware bubble, the hosts were sharing a vSphere Distributed Switch.

The switch ports of the old ESXi hosts were configured as Hybrid ports. The switch ports of the new hosts were configured as Trunk ports, to streamline the switch and port configuration. read more

Demystifying “Interfaces on which heartbeats are not seen”

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By accident, I found a heartbeat/ VLAN issue on a NetScaler cluster at one of my customers. The NetScaler ADC appliances have three interfaces connected to a switch stack. Two of the three interfaces were configured as a channel (LAG). This is a snippet from the config:

On the switch stack, the port to which interface 1/3 is connected, is configured as an access port. The ports, to which the channel is connected, is configured as a trunk port with some permitted VLANs. The customer is using HPE Comware based switches. The terminology is the same for Cisco. If you use HPE ProVision or Alcatel Lucent Enterprise, translate “access” to “untagged” and “trunk” to “tagged”. Because the channel is configured as a trunk port on the switch, the tagall option was set. read more

Azure PowerShell vs. Azure RM PowerShell

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In 2014, Microsoft announced the Azure Preview Portal, which was going GA in December 2015. Since January 8, 2018, the classic Azure Portal is turned off. The “Preview Portal” was more than a facelift. The classic Azure Portal was based on the Service Management mode, often called the “classic deployment model”, whereas the new Azure Portal uses the Resource Manager model. Azure Service Management (ASM) and Azure Resource Management are both deployment models. The Resource Manager model eases the deployment of complex setups by using templates to deploy, update and manage resources within a resource group as a single operation. read more

Security: If it doesn’t hurt, you’re doing it wrong!

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The Informationsverbund Berlin-Bonn (IVBB), the secure network of the german government , was breached by an unknown hacker group. Okay, a secure government network might be a worthy target for an attack, but your network not, right? Do you use the same password for multiple accounts? There were multiple massive data breaches in the past. Have you ever checked if your data were also compromised? I can recommend haveibeenpwned.com. If you want to have some fun, scan GitHub for -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----. Do you use a full disk encryption on your laptop or PC? Do you sign and/ or encrypt emails using S/MIME or PGP? Do you use different passwords for different services? Do you use 2FA/ MFA to secury importan services? Do you never work with admin privileges when doing normal office tasks? No? Why? Because it’s uncomfortable to do it right, isn’t it? read more

Unsupported hardware family ‘vmx-06’

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A customer of mine got an appliance from a software vendor. The appliance was delivered as ZIP file with a VMDK, a MF, and an OVF file. Unfortunately, the appliance was created with VMware Workstation 6.0 with virtual machine hardware version 6, which is incompatible with VMware ESXi (Virtual machine hardware versions). During deployment, my customer got this error:

The OVF file includes a line with the VM hardware version.

If you change this line from vmx-06 to vmx-07, the hash of the OVF changes, and you will get an error during the deployment of the appliance because of the wrong file hash. read more

NetScaler native OTP does not work for users with many group memberships

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Some days ago, I have implemented one-time passwords (OTP) for NetScaler Gateway for one of my customers. This feature was added with NetScaler 12, and it’s a great way to secure NetScaler Gateway with a native NetScaler feature. Native OTP does not need any third party servers. But you need a NetScaler Enterprise license, because nFactor Authentication is a requirement.

To setup NetScaler native OTP, I followed the availbe guides on the internet.

The setup is pretty straightforward. But I used the AD extensionAttribute15  instead of userParameters, because my customer already used userParameters  for something else. Because of this, I had to change the search filter from  userParameters>=#@  to extensionAttribute15>=#@ . read more

Meltdown & Spectre: What about Microsoft Exchange?

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On January 18, 2018, Microsoft has published KB4074871 which has the title “Exchange Server guidance to protect against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities”. As you might guess, Exchange is affected by Meltdown & Spectre – like any other software. Microsoft explains in KB4074871:

Because these are hardware-level attacks that target x64-based and x86-based processor systems, all supported versions of Microsoft Exchange Server are affected by this issue.

Like Citrix, Microsoft does not offer any updates to address this issue, because there is nothing to fix in Microsoft Exchange. Instead of this, Microsoft recommends to run the lates Exchange Server cumulative update and any required security updates. On top, Microsoft recommends to check software before it is deployed into production. If Exchange is running in a VM, Microsoft recommends to follow the instructions offered by the cloud or hypervisor vendor. read more

Meltdown & Spectre: What about HPE Storage and Citrix NetScaler?

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In addition to my shortcut blog post about Meltdown and Spectre with regard of Microsoft Windows, VMware ESXi and vCenter, and HPE ProLiant, I would like to add some additional information about HPE Storage and Citrix NetScaler.

When we talk about Meltdown and Spectre, we are talking about three different vulnerabilities:

  • CVE-2017-5715 (branch target injection)
  • CVE-2017-5753 (bounds check bypass)
  • CVE-2017-5754 (rogue data cache load)

CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 are known as “Spectre”, CVE-2017-5754 is known as “Meltdown”. If you want to read more about these vulnerabilities, please visit meltdownattack.com. read more

The Meltdown/ Spectre shortcut blogpost for Windows, VMware and HPE

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TL;DR

Jump to

I will try to update this blog post regularly!

Change History

01-13-2018: Added information regarding VMSA-2018-0004
01-13-2018: HPE has pulled Gen8 and Gen9 system ROMs
01-13-2018: VMware has updated KB52345 due to issues with Intel microcode updates
01-18-2018: Updated VMware section
01-24-2018: Updated HPE section
01-28-2018: Updated Windows Client and Server section
02-08-2018: Updated VMware and HPE section
02-20-2018: Updated HPE section
04-17-2018: Updated HPE section

Many blog posts have been written about the two biggest security vulnerabilities discovered so far. In fact, we are talking about three different vulnerabilities: read more