Thursday, October 9, 2025
PRTG jumping on the Grafana Bandwagon
Our friends over at Paessler are jumping on the Grafana bandwagon and providing an improved dashboarding solution. The OpsBoard product has proven to be kind of a mess.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Windows 11 Local User Creation
Seems that creating a new local user in Windows 11 isn't quite as easy as you'd expect. But PowerShell makes it fairly simple. To create a new local "backup/emergency" user you can issue these commands from an Admin PowerShell. Of course, make sure to use a good solid password. The second command will add the user to the local Administrators group.
PS>New-LocalUser -Name BackupUser -AccountNeverExpires
cmdlet New-LocalUser at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:
Password: **********
Name Enabled Description
---- ------- -----------
BackupUser True
PS>Add-LocalGroupMember -Name Administrators -Member BackupUser
It should be noted that is you are looking to utilize Remote Desktop on this machine, it will need to be Windows 11 Pro. You can get that info with this command.
Get-WmiObject win32_operatingsystem | select Caption, Version
Caption Version
------- -------
Microsoft Windows 11 Home 10.0.26100
And, to grab your MAK, there's a command for that too:
(Get-WmiObject -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Passkeys - an explanation
I have been struggling with passkeys lately for a couple of reasons.
I have been working fully remotely for many years now and enjoy the flexibility of being about to do this work from just about anywhere I have access to a computer with high speed access to the internet. This means that I can almost sit down in any location with any computer and do the majority of my work without any additional software or hardware aside from my cell phone.
As long as I have access to a web browser, I can do 75% of my daily workload. That means email, Teams, Outlook, and access to a support portal. As you can guess, this requires secure authentication to these services. Secure authentication has changed a LOT over the years and lately it has taken a turn towards "Passkeys".
Now I don't mind depending on a hardware device such as a phone, FIDO key, or other Authenticator service (app) that exchanges anonymous (random) data to allow access to a system (two factor auth). I do have a problem with a service that holds that data along with other data about me and has control over how that data is shared and who has control over that data (myself or the vendor).
Here is a good explanation of the benfits and pitalls of using these Passkeys along with some alternatives.
PRTG bringing the educational material
I've been supporting PRTG for a while now and I've always had great things to say about the support people behind the application. Their documentation and product support team has always been spot on and up to date. The application itself is also a great tool that has always performed just the way you would expect. There is obviously a great group of people behind the scenes doing something right.
They also have been pumping out the blog posts recently and one of the latest was a great informative read that really highlights a lot of things that anyone supporting anything in IT should know.
Network Protocols are the backbone of the internet and how everything communicates with everything else. PRTG knows a thing or two about them being a leader in the monitoring field for some time now and they have written a great article explaining them in simple, easy to follow material.
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