Let’s everyone be honest here… working in Information Technology requires certain skills. Probably the most important skill set is what I’d call your ‘Google-Fu‘. Your ability to efficiently search Google using various keywords to find useful information on the problem or issue confronting you. I often find some of the better written but least ranks articles by removing the manufacturer from the search results. Here’s an example if I wanted to exclude any results from the domain cisco.com, I would append the following to the Google search, “-site:cisco.com”. This would show me all search results except for anything from the Cisco website.

Articles

Cisco ASA- Basic LDAP Authentication by Dan – It’s been a while since I configured a Cisco ASA to authenticate VPN users against a Microsoft Windows Active Directory Domain Controller. If you Google ‘Cisco ASA Active Directory Authentication’ you’ll get hundreds of links and articles. I choose to scroll down a bit in the list and chose the link from IN THE WORKS – A tech apprenticeship. Thankfully Dan’s article from 2016 was straight forward and easy to follow. The trick was in reusing the DefaultWEBVPNGroup tunnel-group so users don’t need to select from multiple tunnel-groups in the client.

Authenticate to vCenter from Active Directory credentials by Romain Serre – A customer wanted to authenticate with vSphere using his Active Directory credentials. In this specific case the client was using the vCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) and not a typical Windows Server running vCenter. I initially ran into some DNS issues, thankfully the CLI error gave me the hint I needed as the web UI error was pretty basic.

How to Configure NTP Server on Windows Server 2016 by Stefan – A client was having some significant clock drift issues with one of their servers. I recalled the command was w32tm but could recall exactly what the commands were to enable NTP. Stefan has an easy to follow post. Stefan, I’m not a big fan of ad banners placed in the middle of the content and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Cheers!