By default, Linux systems allow both password-based and key-based authentication over SSH. If you have a server with SSH open to the world, password-based authentication shouldn’t be allowed at all.

To disable password-based authentication, edit the SSH config file:

nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Add the following lines:

PasswordAuthentication no

PubkeyAuthentication yes

Now generate a new private/public key pair:

ssh-keygen

id_rsa is your private key

id_rsa.pub is the public certificate thumbprint that must be added to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

The SSH service must be restarted.

service ssh restart

Now you can connect to your server with key-based authentication only. If connecting from a Linux system the file’s permissions must be set to 600.

chmod 600 id_rsa

ssh -i id_rsa ip@username

If you like using Putty, you’ll have to load the file with PuttyGen and save the private key as .ppk.

PuttyGen can be downloaded here: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Links:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/346857/how-do-i-force-ssh-to-only-allow-users-with-a-key-to-log-in

Today I stumbled upon this very useful site that helps you find very cheap virtual private servers (VPS) around the globe. The public IPv4 address is shared and NAT’d across multiple servers. If that’s no problem for you, the cheapest servers are 0.15€ a month with 128MB RAM and 1 vCPU.

Also, some public IP addresses are blocked in China and/or Russia.

Have fun!

https://www.serverhunter.com/

A quick post on how to change the Windows display language with Powershell. You might use these commands based on any logic that determines the user’s location/language. For instance, I created a script that gets executed on logon and sets the language based on some criteria (maybe an Active-Directory group or attribute).

Set-Culture en-US
Set-WinSystemLocale -SystemLocale en-US
Set-WinUILanguageOverride -Language en-US
Set-WinUserLanguageList en-US -Force
Set-WinHomeLocation -GeoId 244

You can find the right GeoID on Microsoft’s website

There is a built-in app in Windows that helps you record your screen and automatically creates steps with screenshots and a description. Just search “Steps Recorder” in the start menu.

Running the program as administrator allows you to record programs that run with highest privileges. Just start recording, go through the steps needed for the specific action, stop the recording and finally save the steps.

A compressed file will be created containing the report as a MHT file. It can be opened with a common browser.

A very handy tool both for documentations or end users.

Enjoy!

Hey folks!

Here is a quick way to find inactive AD Users in your environment. Get-ADUser ist the cmdlet we are going to use.

We are getting all users from the highest OU (domain.com) and using the Property LastLogonDate, which will not be returned if not specified in the -Properties parameter. After that a Where statement is going to show users that haven’t logged in since 90 days or more.

Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties lastlogondate | where { $_.lastlogondate -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-90) }

We could also specify the OU where the command is going to search:

Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties lastlogondate -SearchBase “OU=TerminatedEmployees,DC=Company,DC=com”| where { $_.lastlogondate -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-90) }|select Name,Lastlogondate

There is also the -SearchScope Onelevel parameter to determine that we are not going to search recursively:

Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties lastlogondate -SearchBase “OU=TerminatedEmployees,DC=Company, DC=com” -SearchScope OneLevel | where { $_.lastlogondate -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-90) }|select Name,Lastlogondate

Have fun!