I was recently working with a set of excel spreadsheets that have macros to consolidate data from multiple diffrent files into a single consolidated file. I needed to move these to sharepoint online, and it took me a long time to find the correct URL format to pass to the Workbooks.Open Filename parameter in order to open the sharepoint URL. What worked for me was the following URL format:
\\tenant.sharepoint.com@SSL\sitename\path\filename

I also had a look at how you would implement multiple ISP load-balancing on an edgerouter. The following config instrcutions are what I came up with:


1: Firewall rule to use load-balance group (we can restrict to specific traffic)
set firewall modify rule 1 action modify
set firewall modify rule 1 modify lb-group

I had a look at replacing a Mikrotik with a Unifi Edgerouter, specificaly looking at QoS and whether one was easier to understand than the other. My conclusion was that the Mikrotik has better visibility with its queue trees, however the process for setting up QoS on the edgerouter is as follows:

One note is that the edgerouter implementation is better at guaranteeing that all traffic will hit the QoS queues, compared to a Mikrotik where packets marked with a new packet mark will go direct to the interface until they are explicitly put into a queue.

In order to re-generate the QR code for an existing google authenticator, the following command can be used once the qrencode package has been installed:

echo "otpauth://totp/label?secret=`head -1 ~username/.google_authenticator `" | qrencode -t ANSI -o -

I have been dealing with an issue where a Veeam backup copy job is not running periodic compaction of the full backup file. In my case I need the compaction to run in order for the full backup file to be re-aligned to the ReFS block size to allow fast clones to work. The fix is as follows:

1. Create the following registry key:
Registry path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\

Name: BackupCopyJobForceCompact
Type: REG_DWORD (0 False, 1 True)
Default value: 0 (disabled)

SCST can set the parameter thin_provisioned=1 when a device is opened. If this option is set, it will send an UNMAP (or TRIM) command to the underlying block device, or use fallocate() with the FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE | FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE flags to zero out the disk space.

We have been having issues recently when trying to clone a VM in SCVMM. The error we were seeing was:

Error (2912): "An internal error has occurred trying to contact the server: NO_PARAM: NO_PARAM

Libssl does not support SHA512/256 natively, but these hashes can be calculated using the following code:

I have been considering some improvements to ddumbfs which will make the on-disk format incompatible with the current code. As a result, I have also been considering other hashing functions and libraries to use. Below are a set of tables to show different hash functions, libraries and the speed that I was getting when running them on a Xeon E5-2609 CPU:

Today I came across a HyperV VM where new snapshots were not being shown in SCVMM. I then checked the HyperV console which showed all the new snapshots, but there was one in the chain that had the text "- backup -" in the checkpoint name, which could not be deleted from the HyperV GUI either (the delete checkpoint option was not in the menu).