Required Hardware

• Raspberry Pi
• Power Supply
• microSD card
• Screen
• HDMI cable
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Network Connection
• External hard drive

Installation and Setup of Raspberry OS

Write Image to microSD card

At first we are going to install Raspberry Pi OS (or as it was previously named Raspbian) by writing the image to the microSD card. They provide a simple Imager tool for multiple operating systems like Windows, macOS and Ubuntu. You can download it here

After downloading the Imager application, simply execute the setup and start the installation:

After the installation is completed, you can open the application on your system. Then you can select the operating system which should be written to the SD card. Now you can select the target, which is of course the microSD card of the Raspberry Pi.

After pressing Write, you can see the progress of writing the image to the SD card on the bottom.

When the image has been written to the SD card, the image is getting verified:

If verification is completed, you can remove the SD card from the card reader or laptop and insert it into your Raspberry Pi.

Configuration of Raspberry Pi OS

When you have inserted the SD card to your raspberry, you can also connect a keyboard, a mouse, a screen and a network cable if possible. Then you can connect the power supply to boot it. At the first start, the operating system will get installed. This will take a few minutes, but not too long. After that, you can continue with the basic configuration which is pretty straightforward. You can define things like time and date, keyboard layout, WiFi Connection and so on. I would also suggest you to change the password of the default user “pi” to your personal one.

Establish a SSH/VNC connection

In the configuration of your Raspberry Pi you can also enable services. I suggest you to enable at least the following 2 services: SSH and VNC so you can remotely connect to your device from your laptop. This has also the advantage that you do not need anything attached at your Raspberry Pi (like screen, mouse or keyboard).

After activating the SSH service in the configuration, you can use your favourite SSH client. I am using MobaXterm. Simply enter the IP address of the Pi, specify the username “pi” and your personalized password. You have to use the default SSH port 22.

If you see the following output, you connected successfully to your Raspberry Pi via Secure Shell!

Another possibility is to use the VNC connection if you want the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Raspberry Pi OS. To establish a VNC connection, you need additional software like RealVNC. After installing the application, start it and enter the remote IP address of the Pi:

Then you are able to see the video output of your Raspberry Pi OS and can do everything there.

Installation of OpenMediaVault (OMV)

Now, after the setup and configuration of Raspberry Pi OS is completed, we can finally move on to the installation of our NAS software OpenMediaVault. The basic installation is truly simple, because we just need to execute one line of script in the Pi command line:

wget -O - https://github.com/OpenMediaVault-Plugin-Developers/installScript/raw/master/install | sudo bash

This line of code will directly start the install script for OMV5. Basically there is no action needed from our side. So, grab a coffee or something like that because this will take up to a hour to complete. After starting it, you will see this screen:

During the execution, you might see a lot of packages getting installed on your system:

If you were patient enough to let it finish, you will finally see this screen, where the SSH connection gets lost because of a reboot of the device. When the Pi is running again, the installation of OpenMediaVault5 NAS Raspberry Pi is completed!

OpenMediaVault Web Interface

OpenMediaVault will automatically start when your Raspberry Pi boots up. You can access the web interface by simply entering the IP address of the Pi into your web browser on your laptop e.g. in the same network. In my case it is http://192.168.8.112/
The default login is:
Username: admin
Password: openmediavault

The web interface looks like that:

So, this was the guide to get OpenMediaVault5 NAS Raspberry Pi running. I will go into detail on using it as a NAS in another article, but I need some more time to write it. Hope to see you soon again on my site.

The post Installation of OpenMediaVault5 NAS Raspberry Pi appeared first on HackBuddies.

Basically it is a very simple script, but I will quickly go through it. Of course you need to define the UNC path to the file share or folder. Then you will loop through all the existing directories with a Foreach. At each folder you will get the permissions with Get-ACL. Then you need another Foreach to get through all the granted permissions which are inherited or directly set. Then you will add each line to your report and finally export it as a CSV file for further processing. That’s it!

$FolderPath = dir -Directory -Path "\\fileserver\fileshare"
$Report = @()
Foreach ($Folder in $FolderPath) {
$Acl = Get-Acl -Path $Folder.FullName
foreach ($Access in $acl.Access)
{
$Properties = [ordered]@{'FolderName'=$Folder.FullName;'AD
Group or
User'=$Access.IdentityReference;'Permissions'=$Access.FileSystemRights;'Inherited'=$Access.IsInherited}
$Report += New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property $Properties
}
}
$Report | Export-Csv -path "C:\scripts\FolderPermissions.csv"

You can extend this script by sending the report as email message directly via PowerShell, look here. You can also create a scheduled task / cronjob for this script to Generate ACL Report FileShare periodically.

The post Generate ACL Report of File Share with PowerShell to CSV appeared first on HackBuddies.

Last time I had the task to copy massive amounts of data between two file share systems. With massive amounts I talk about Terabytes 🙂 In addition, one of the systems was productive and the other one the new system, so the solution needed to be reliable and stable. So I asked myself, how can I transfer these files and folders? The answer is Robocopy: How to Copy Massive Amounts of Data

So I tried several things and had a look at the possibilites of the systems. I ended up using the simple Robocopy command with the file shares. Of course the client/server executing the Robocopy command had to be in the same local network in order to ensure a good copy speed.

Robocopy offers you the opportunity to define a lot of parameters for your copy job. For example you can define if the Access Control List (NTFS Permissions) should be copied to the destination host, or if you want to create the Access Groups from scratch. Imagine that on the old system there was a lot of direct access set for the users instead of Active Directory groups – in this case building the Access Groups from scratch can be very helpful to get a clean file share.
Another great thing about Robocopy is that it has basically a Resume option because it copies only the changed or new files after comparing source and destination host.

The Robocopy Command

But let’s talk about the command itself which is pretty simple and you can fulfill nearly all requirements with a One-Liner!

Basically you can split the command as following:

• Source
• Destination
• Source Options
• Copy Options

So let’s start with the probably most basic command. We want to copy a local directory from one partition to another

robocopy c:\temp\test d:\temp\

This simple command will copy the folder test and all files to the location d:\temp – but not subfolders!

Copy Everything (including permissions)

If you simply want to copy everything (also subfolders, empty subfolders, file owners) from the source to destination including the NTFS permission (Windows Access Control list) you can use this command.

robocopy c:\temp\test d:\temp\ /E /COPYALL

Copying over Network

If you want to use the Robocopy command for copying over the network, like in my case, I recommend you to use the following options and switches to get a good result.

/E -> copy all subfolders, including empty ones.
/V -> produce Verbose output, showing skipped files.
/ZB -> use restartable mode; if access denied use Backup mode.
/R:1 -> number of Retries on failed copies
/W:1 -> Wait time between retries: default is 30 seconds
/NP -> No Progress – don’t display percentage copied.
/COPYALL -> COPY ALL file info (equivalent to /COPY: DATSOU)
/LOG -> LOG location

robocopy \\source_share\folder \\destination_share\folder /E /V /ZB /R:1 /W:1 /NP /COPYALL /LOG:c:\robocopy.log

So, this ultimative copy job will copy all subfolders, copy all file information, produces verbose output to show skipped files, will retry failed copies and uses the restartable mode with backup mode in case of failed access. In Addition a log file will be generated with all the details of every single file copied. It is simply great! 🙂

Source: https://community.netapp.com/t5/Data-ONTAP-Discussions/Fileserver-Migration-with-robocopy/td-p/118615

Please find the whole documentation of the Robocopy command directly at Microsoft Docs
Robocopy: How to Copy Massive Amounts of Data

The post Robocopy: How to Copy Massive Amounts of Data reliably appeared first on HackBuddies.

At first you need to create an account obviously. Just visit the website: CloudFlare
After creating your personal account, you can start to configure CloudFlare for your website. Simply enter your URL and then you will be guided through the configuration process.

One of the first setups during setup is to change the nameservers at your web hosting provider. So, you need to log on to the management portal of your web hosting, go to your domain settings / DNS settings and adapt the nameservers to the CloudFlare nameservers displayed. From this time on, all your DNS records will be maintained at CloudFlare and not at your hosting provider anymore, keep this in mind. It can take up to 24 hours until the changes are applied, so do not expect that to work instantly.

If you are looking for a new reliable and performant webhost, I can totally recommend you Bluehost #ad

Change your nameservers

After you hit the button “Done, check nameservers”, you will get the updated status of “Pending Nameserver Update”, which will switch to “Active” as soon as the nameserver update is applied.

Review DNS records

The next step is to review your existing DNS records which were imported from your hosting provider to CloudFlare. In my case, there were:

• A records
• CNAME records
• MX records
• TXT records

If you are unaware of DNS records and their types you can check out my other post DNS Records
After you reviewed and compared them with the existing ones at your web host you can confirm that import and continue the setup.

Basically, that’s it! The initial setup Of CloudFlare CDN is finished. Now is the time to wait for your pending nameserver update at the domain registrar. You can check the CloudFlare portal for the current status. As soon as this status is “Active”, you can check out the different functions there. Keep in mind that the free version is limited but it is a great way to test the tool in general and get an overview.

You can also perform a speed test there. In my case (without any customizations and with only free version of CloudFlare), the speed could be improved by 29%:

The post Setup of CloudFlare Content Delivery Network (CDN) for your WordPress Website appeared first on HackBuddies.

Web Page Performance Test for hackbuddies.com

This week I tested my website to get an overview of the performance and I wanted to share the results with you so you can also get a quick overview of the tool and possibilites. In this test I did not define any advanced options, just the location Frankfurt in Europe as a location. Let’s check the results:So, on the top you will get a first overview with the grades. The main categories here are:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB)
  This is basically the server response time (back-end side)
• Keep-Alive Enabled
  HTTP persistent connections are about sending concurrent requests over a single connection
• Compress Transfer
  gzip compression can be used for HTTP requests and is able to reduce the size of the HTTP responses
• Compress Images
  Checks images which can be compressed without losing image quality
• Cache Static Content
  Caching details are transferred in the header of the response from the server. With the help of cached static content you can save resources and requests.
• Effective Use of CDN (Content Delivery Network)
  A CDN is a distributed network of proxies (data centers) and offers high availablity as well as performance for globally distributed end users

Waterfall View/Diagram

In the Waterfall View you can easily determine loaded files which take a lot of time and are therefore slowing down your page speed significantly. You will find images, CSS and JS files as well as fonts (e.g. in format .woff2). Of course these files can also be loaded from external sources like Google Fonts.
In the diagram you can differentiate between waiting times, DNS resolution, connection, SSL encryption and so on:

Request Details

You can get an even more detailed overview by navigating to the Request Details by simply scrolling down a bit at the Waterfall Diagram. You will see the start time of the request, the time for the DNS lookup, the Time To First Byte (interesting for external sites), the HTTP status codes and much more:

Performance Review

Last but not least I want to tell you a little bit about the Performance Review. Here are all files listed and you will see all grade evaluations for each file which is really really useful. As you can see in the screenshot, I haven’t configured a Content Delivery Network (CDN) yet for my website and therefore it is just available at external sources like Google Analytics or Fonts. But I am currently setting up CloudFlare and will write an article about it if you are interested.

Performance Details

After scrolling down you will get a summary for the assessment of your grades. You can easily detect non-progressive JPEGS, non-compressed images or non-cached content. In this way you are able to easily determine and fix these things which will improve your website speed – believe me 🙂

Maybe you are now also interested in executing a Website Performance Test WebPageTest.org and want to share your results here.

The post Analyze the Performance of your Website with WebPageTest.org appeared first on HackBuddies.

The difference to other Raspberry Pi images is that they offer .img.xz files, which can be written directly to the SD card without decompressing. To write the image to the SD card, the application balenaEtcher is available for different operating systems and also in a portable version, thus you do not need to install the application:
https://www.balena.io/etcher/

At first, select the downloaded image and the target device (should be the microSD card of your Raspberry):

Now, the flashing process is running:

After completion, you should see the following screen:

Great! After flashing the image to the SD card, the installation of the system will be completed after first start of your Raspberry Pi. This can take a few minutes. Please note that a network connection is required during this installation procedure. After one more reboot, the system is ready to use.
The system can be accessed via the Web Interface. Simply enter the IP address of the Pi in your browser. The default login data for the web interface is:
admin :: openmediavault

The default login data for a SSH connection is:
root :: openmediavault

The post Setup Of A Raspberry Pi NAS with OpenMediaVault appeared first on HackBuddies.

They offer various tools like a mailserver Blacklist check, mail header analysis, MX lookup and many more. I want to show you the tools which I use and like the most thus you get an overview about what is possible there.

MX Lookup

The MX Lookup tool lists all MX records of your domain, ordered by priority field. The check uses the domain’s authoriative name servers, so if you make any changes to the configuration, it should show up after another check. Simply enter your domain name in the form field and start the lookup:

The result looks like the following. It shows my two existing MX records with priorities, hostnames and IP addresses. In addition the reporting nameserver is shown at the bottom.

SMTP Test to analyze Mailserver problems

You can directly perform a SMTP test for your reported mailservers. If the server can be reached, a simple SMTP test is performed and can give you more information about a faulty configuration.

Other tools

If you navigate to “More” in the navigation bar, you can find a bunch of tools and find the one you currently need. Just check it out!

If you need help using MxToolbox to analyze mailserver and DNS problems let me know in the comments.

The post Using MxToolbox to analyze mailserver and DNS problems appeared first on HackBuddies.

Firstly, there are some basic operators:
^Hack -> This would match any strings starting with "Hack"
buddies$ ->  This would match any strings ending with "buddies" 

If you want to match any characters between for example a-z:
[a-z] -> matches any small character
[A-Z] -> matches any big character 
[a-zA-Z] -> matches any character

You can also define how often the character or string shall appear:
a? -> matches zero or one "a"
a* -> matches zero or more "a"
a+ -> matches one or more "a"
a{5} -> exactly 5 times "a"
a{5,} -> 5 or more times "a"
a{1,5} -> Between 1 and 5 times "a" 

If you want to match everything within round brackets:
(.*?) 

There are so many applications and possibilities for using Regular Expressions (RegEx). Just try it out and let me know if you built some cool search patterns which are maybe unique and useful! I will add them to the post afterwards. For example you can use them in one of our PowerShell scripts, let’s say to filter for specific group names like here

The post Using Regular Expressions (RegEx) appeared first on HackBuddies.

When you are setting up your new website, one of the essential things to configure are the DNS records of your domain. Without proper DNS records, the website and email service will not work properly. But I want to explain it step by step.

The Domain Name System (“DNS”) is responsible for translating domain names into IP addresses. The IP addresses point to the server, where the services like webserver or mailserver are located, in most cases your shared webhosting or dedicated virtual server.

A record

The A record resolves your domain name to the corresponding IP address, where your website is hosted (webserver). In case of my website, the following A records are set up:

hackbuddies.com 185.51.8.86
www.hackbuddies.com 185.51.8.86
*.hackbuddies.com 185.51.8.86

CNAME record

A CNAME record maps one domain name to another, like an alias. The advantage of this one is that you do not have to change all IP addresses if the web host changes. So, a CNAME points e.g. to an A record, which points to the IP address. Only the IP address of the A record needs to be changed and the CNAME will point to the correct and new address.

MX record

The MX record specifies the mailserver of your domain. In most cases, the mail service is also included in your webhosting package. MX records contain an additional field called Priority, which defines the preferred server. If it has the same value for two entries which is pretty common, the mail will be evenly delivered to the defined mailservers. The MX record is used in combination with an A record and cannot be used with a CNAME record.

The post Different types of DNS records for your website appeared first on HackBuddies.