Following the WannaCry Ransomeware attack in 2017, Windows stopped supporting the SMB1 protocol – and along with it Windows hosts’ previous primary broadcast discovery mechanism. Since then, Linux hosts have mostly gone dark when it comes to sharing discoverable network shares with Windows network clients. However, Windows supports the Web Service Discovery (WSD) protocol. Ubuntu has added support for WSDD – and now you can easily do the same for any Linux distribution that supports Python.

For the past few weeks I’ve been battling to get my Linux instances to access file shares on my Windows 10 instances over the network. Whether it was Ubuntu, Fedora, or RedHat, the recent upgrades to Windows 10 left my Windows shares inaccessible via Samba. Troubleshooting was difficult as I had nothing to go on exception really ambiguous messages via the syslog (“Failed to mount Windows share: Connection timed out”). After some trial and error it all came down to an undocumented change in how Windows 10 supports the SMB protocol.

CenturyLink’s gigabit service is pretty awesome, but their provided routers are pretty average when it comes to configurability and simply raw performance. The problem with this is that the way CenturyLink’s Gigabit service runs, you need to do a little more work to configure just any normal router to work with the service. For me, it took a little bit of digging and experimentation to figure out the right way to get a third party modem to work with CenturyLink; in my case a high performance Asus AC-3200, previously used with my Wave gigabit internet service due to it’s high performance routing backplane.

Ubiquiti WiFi gear is becoming well known as the go to brand for nerds wanting to have home WiFi that competes with commercial set ups. The Ubiquiti AC-PRO access points in particular are in the category of “next level” consumer gear, and after installing them i’ve never looked back. Being commercial gear the Ubiquiti APs do have one annoying requirement: you need to run controller software on your network to monitor and control the access points through Ubiquiti’s cloud based controller software. Luckily you can run this software on a range of hardware – and a $35 Raspberry Pi is just the ticket.

When configuring an Azure Virtual Network one of the most common things you'll want to do is setup a Point-to-Site VPN so that you can actually get to your servers to manage and maintain them. Azure Point-to-Site VPNs use client certificates to secure connections which can be quite complicated to configure so Microsoft has gone the extra mile to make it easy for you to configure and get setup – sadly at the cost of losing the ability to connect through the command line or through PowerShell – Let's change that.