Email address tags in Postfix and Dovecot

What if you could tag the mail address you provide when registering for various services to simplify the management of the inevitable stream of unsolicited mail that follows? If you could register myname+theservicename@mydomain.tld it would make it very easy to recognize mail from that service – and it would make it easy to pinpoint common… Continue reading Email address tags in Postfix and Dovecot

ZFS backups in Proxmox – Part 2

A while ago I wrote about trying out pve-zsync for backing up some Proxmox VE entities. I kept using regular Proxmox backups for the other machines, though: It is a robust way to get recoverable machine backups but it’s not very elegant. For example all backups are full: There’s no logic for managing incremental or… Continue reading ZFS backups in Proxmox – Part 2

Troubleshooting vSphere update woes

It’s 2020 and I still occasionally stumble on products that can’t handle international characters. I’ve been running my update rounds on our vSphere environment, but one host simply refused to perform is update compliance check. To troubleshoot, I enabled the ssh service and remoted in to the host, looking for errors in /var/log/vua.log. Sure enough,… Continue reading Troubleshooting vSphere update woes

Enabling the booking of Teams meetings in Outlook on Mac

This issue had me scratching my head for a while: With the latest version of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Teams installed on my Mac running Catalina, I couldn’t enable the booking of Teams meetings from Outlook. The solution turned out to be to remove the regular Office programs and replace them with Office 365. The… Continue reading Enabling the booking of Teams meetings in Outlook on Mac

Trusting Palo Alto GlobalProtect to use a macOS machine certificate

On a managed Mac with a machine certificate, when the certificate is renewed, Palo Alto GlobalProtect will prompt for administrative credentials before connecting. This is because the executable isn’t allowed to directly read from the System keychain. There’s a nice explanation and fix described on Palo Alto’s site, but in case that one goes missing,… Continue reading Trusting Palo Alto GlobalProtect to use a macOS machine certificate

Another case of “Who watches the watchers”

This text was updated to reflect the current status of the story on 2020-05-27. Not a good look for Trend Micro: Security researcher Bill Demirkapi took apart their Rootkit Buster software and described his findings in a long, technical article. The main findings: The program installs a driver which is designed to subvert Microsoft’s quality… Continue reading Another case of “Who watches the watchers”

Deploying VMware virtual machines using Ansible

I’ve been experimenting with deploying entire environments using Ansible. As usual I had to pass a couple of small thresholds and stumble into a couple of pitfalls before I was comfortable with solution, and so I’m documenting the process here. I’m thinking of creating a separate post describing my general Ansible workflow in more detail… Continue reading Deploying VMware virtual machines using Ansible

ZFS backups in Proxmox

I’ve been experimenting with using ZFS snapshots for on- and off-site backups of my Proxmox virtualization environment. For now I’m leaning towards using pve-zsync for backing up my bigger but non-critical machines, and then using syncoid to achieve incremental pull backups off-site. After the initial seed – which I perform over a LAN link –… Continue reading ZFS backups in Proxmox