schroeder's questions

We are buying Microsoft 365 licenses and the reseller is requesting full global domain admin rights in order to administer the licenses.

I'm thinking, "no way in Hello Kitty", but maybe I'm being unrealistic.

Is this a normal request? Is there a better permission set to provide them? What's the typical expectation here?

I'm thinking global reader, if anything, but I'm still in the camp that the reseller should not get visibility at all into our domain.

I have a requirement to be able to terminate EC2 instances in under a minute.

The current process takes just under 2 minutes per instance because the OS shutdown process takes 60 seconds. I want to speed up terminations considerably, if possible.

Does anyone know of a way to speed up the terminate() function in EC2? Is there a way to "pull the plug" without a shutdown process as other virtualization solutions do?

Background:
In Boto, I call the terminate() function with the wait_until_terminated() function before handling subnet deletion or other follow-up tasks.

But, I am triggering boto from a 3rd party API that times out if processes (like terminations) take longer than a minute. That means every time I terminate, the API returns errors.

I have tried to work with the 3rd party to increase the timeout, but things like terminations are not in their expected use cases, and as of right now, there is no solution from the 3rd party.

I tried a stop(Force=True) and it is a little faster, but still over a minute.

I tried to forcibly remove the EBS volume, but you have to shutdown the instance first, which brings the process over the 1 minute mark.

I tried SSH'ing in to run various shutdown and halt command arguments, but I cannot find an OS command that runs faster than 60 seconds. The running services are already at a minimum, and I cannot speed up the OS shutdown any further.

I'm hoping to find a way to "pull the plug" via AWS. Or some other method to quickly terminate. It seems like terminations require an OS shutdown, which is a little odd to me when I want to torch the instance anyway.

We are using a Fortibalancer for our web servers (Win2012 with IIS) and we have run into a strange issue. IE users will experience timeouts (~77s) in getting a response from our servers. Packet traces show ZeroWindow probes and ACKs happening at the time of the timeouts.

These are the facts:

1. When we bypass the load balancers, there is no issue and no Zero Window packets (let alone probes)

2. Packet traces on the servers show Zero Window packets to the load balancers, but not to the servers

3. Wireshark shows the highest packet 'size' as 16KB when using the load balancers, but shows 64KB when clients connect directly to the servers.

4. The issue is not related to load: It can happen with almost no traffic or during periods of high traffic.

5. We cannot replicate the problem, but it does happen around predictable times (~9:30am or ~3:30am) but not every day. (Nothing special happens in our environment during those times).

6. Firefox users NEVER experience the problem.

7. IE version does not seem to matter: IE 8-11 users have the same problem.

8. LB's are up-to-date. They perform SSL offloading, and link and load balancing. CPU usage on the LB's have never exceeded 10%.

Because of #1, we know the servers themselves are not the issue.

Because of #2, it seems that the LB's are the bottleneck.

Number 3 gives me pause and there seems to be no way to increase the window size (we've tried and we can't increase from 16KB).

Number 5 is the real killer. Our application does not function well enough on other browsers to test, but FF is the one non-IE browser that does, and users have never, ever experienced a delay. FF is so reliable, we are starting to transition clients over to FF and still have not experienced ZeroWindows while IE users continue to experience them. In their packet traces, I can see that the packet 'size' to the LB's are 100-200 bytes larger than with IE packet streams.

Question:

What can I test next in order to find a direction on remediating the problem? Any ideas on what the problem could be?

This post is a last-ditch effort for ideas.

Windows Server 2012 64-bit. Dedicated hardware.

On reboot, the pre-login screen reports failed patches and attempts recovery. When I log in, the explorer.exe files are missing and I only have a windowed command prompt. Server services appear to be working (SQL, etc). It's acting like it turned itself into Server Core.

• There is no 'last known good' configuration.
• There is no restore point.
• sfc /scannow returns "repair in progress, reboot and scan again".
• DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Scanhealth reports no corruption
• All DaRT tools report a failure to run.

I'd love to be able to repair the OS, get a GUI back to use tools, and/or rollback patches.

Edit Powershell files are also missing.

Looking at a capture and seeing a "NBSS Continuation Message" port 445, but I cannot find any reference anywhere to what this might mean.

I assume it's a normal message for the NetBIOS Session Service, but can't find a definition of it anywhere.

Can someone point me to further details?

I wish to suppress all output to stdout (console) from hping3 from a bash script, but everything I try results in the statistics still being displayed, even tho the individual ping results are suppressed.

I've tried redirecting different ways, command line switch '-q' and nothing works.

Ideas?

hping3 10.1.1.1 -c 1 -q > \dev\null
hping3 10.1.1.1 -c 1 -q > logfile.txt
hping3 10.1.1.1 -c 1 -q 1>\dev\null

All result in the following to the console:

--- 10.1.1.1 hping statistic ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 1.1/1.1/1.1 ms