Web Site Hosting Issue - Windows AD Domain Externally Resolvable

Up until recently we hosted our company web site on an internal Win 2008 IIS server. To ensure that it stayed online in case something happened to the office, we moved the site to some cheap shared hosting with a popular provider. For the most part things are fine but I have run into one problem...

Unfortunately when the Windows domain was set up the admin (not me, I swear to god) used an externally resolvable host name (eg 'example.net' rather than the best practice 'example.local'). This was never a problem as we always hosted our web site on an internal IIS server. Users inside the AD domain are now complaining that they cannot reach the web site from inside the network. I get why this is the case but I am cautious about what sort of DNS changes to make since I am well aware how DNS dependent an active directory domain can be. As a temporary measure I put in a 'www' A record pointing to the IP of the external web server so they can at least reach the site for now.

My question is this: Can I set up a wildcard dns entry on our internal AD DNS server for 'example.net' redirecting to our external web server? I am afraid that putting a wildcard entry for a server that sits outside the AD domain might cause serious problems.

Has anyone ever tried this?

Answer

Cliff,

Yea I know what you mean, been there and done that. The safest thing you can do is what you have already done by adding a www record.

You really can't add a wildcard record because any request for Domain.net will then redirect externally. This is especially true if you rely on DNS for all computer name based lookups and have disabled NetBIOS on the network.

Short term what you have done seems about right. Long term you may want to investigate changing your domain name, I'm not sure how many clients you have internally but this is at times no easy task, but in the longrun will save you so much time and effort.

I think MDMarra has posted before that he doesn't mind using the public DNS records for your internal domain but instead of a local domain extension (i.e. Domain.local) he uses a subdomain (corp.domain.net) or something like that. Just don't use the root, as you have found out.

It's 2019, How to *disable* automatic reboots and updates in Windows 10? Old methods are no longer working

Many of the solutions to prevent windows 10 from doing their auto reboot updates are not working anymore. The solutions posted here:

No, this question is not a duplicate. Hence: "It's 2019"

How to *disable* automatic reboots in Windows 10?

Are outdated and just a waste of time for everyone to try as they do NOT work anymore. It's 2019, what tricks does Microsoft have up their sleeves to force an auto shutdown update?

Many people seeking help want to disable updates completely. Not just auto reboot. Please do not post answers that only disable auto reboot. Alot of the times when windows update with new patches, it removes certain programs that it deems unnecessary. In my case it constantly removes my work's vpn software. wtf!? I just want to disable updates completely!

What are the latest ways of preventing further updates on Windows 10? Home and Pro versions. Solutions that don't need to install software would be best, but also installing 3rd party software can be possible too for the non-tech savvy.

Answer

This tool from Greatis (https://greatis.com/blog/stopupdates10) lets you turn updates on and off easily, I've been using it for quite awhile. After an update's been released I wait for all the crap to get sorted out, you know, things like it deleting ALL your personal files, then install the update once it's been fixed.

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IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

I have added the following rule to my web.config to redirect all incoming request to HTTPS

It fails when ampersands (&) are present in the URL or file name. I've looked at some of the solutions offered and am not interested in allowing special characters through the registry. Is there a way to perform a rewrite to encode the ampersand to & or %26 prior to the redirect rule? Does the HTTPS redirect rule use the original URL or the newly rewritten/encoded version?

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I created directories and files as you see here with a java code by mistake:

 D:\...\storages\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\1\asd\assets\1\Back-Up\2011_0~1\Resources\ some files here.

and now I am not able to delete them. I got the error

The source file name(s) are larger than is supported by the file
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The fileassassin couldn't see the files with file Explorer window and the unlocker program lost the responsibility after a while. Both didn't solve the problem. Do you have another idea ?

I use Windows 7 Professional.

linux - How to clean up hacked user account (not root)?

So I setup a linux server and forgot to disable clear text ssh password or install denyhosts or enable any kind of password policy. Usually I have deny hosts and it works well. As a result of missing this vital step (yes I should automate the process) a user with a weak password has been hacked. Now on the assumption that the general permissions are good what can I do to work out what they did and remove it?

By the way I am a programmer by nature not a system admin so please be kind!

Answer

You can never be completely sure what they did on the user account. But places to start are the .*history files in the home directory.

My advice would be to copy out the known good/important data and then blow the rest away. The intruder could have left any sorts of nasty surprises in configuration files, .bashrc, etc.

You should also check to see if any files owned by the user are on the system and look for running processes:

# find / -user USERNAME
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For the future, I would advise turning on process accounting. You can then check previously run commands using 'lastcomm'.

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I once saw a guy run a command and got a list of all installed applications on his computer. How do I do this?

I would like a list of my currently installed applications. I believe he used WSH somehow.

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Let's say we have a block device (eg. Hard Drive) with 4096 bytes sector size and no 512 bytes emulation is available (The hard drive only understands units of 4096 bytes size).

Is is possible to format the device with a file system which has a logical block of 512 bytes ? How will the fs use the disk blocks ? I mean is it just going to use 512 bytes out of the 4096 bytes and the rest is wasted (one to one mapping between disk sectors and fs blocks) ? I assume if the file system knows about this issue he can make some kind of 512-bytes emulation by itself (read disk sector, modify a portion of 512 bytes in RAM then write back sector to disk) although there will be some overhead or redundant work at every write. I'm not really sure if that makes any sense ! Correct me please.