In this article will be described and shown how to archive your contacts from Gmail, download them locally on your computer and import within Outlook.

1.Procedure

1.1.Export

If you are logged on to your Gmail user interface, the first thing that has to be done is to switch to option contacts. Contacts can be accessed by clicking on the arrow at the end of the word mail.

What we want to do is to archive all the contacts that we have ever sent mail to. Under “Other Contacts” are all of your contacts, and you can export them by clicking on “More” and “Export” as in the pictures below.

1.2.Import

Once you have export the contacts they need to be imported in Outlook. First thing that you need to do is to open Outlook software. In Outlook under option “File” you need to click on option “Open & Export”. According to the pictures below continue to move step by step through the procedure.

On the following illustration, click “Browse” and select the file that you have exported from Gmail.

On the following illustration, click “Finish” and import will start.

When import is finished restart the Outlook and click on the “New Email” in the upper left corner.

New window will open for writing a new mail in which you should be able to locate  „Address Book“. Click on „Address Book“.

Select in drop-down menu file that you have imported, by default  in drop-down menu your mail is selected. After you have selected your file a list of all of your contacts will be listed. Contacts needs to be selected and then click on „TO“ in the lower left corner and then click “OK”.

In this way you have imported all of your contacts from Gmail to your Microsoft Outlook.

The post Instructions for exporting contacts from Gmail and importing in Outlook appeared first on Procudo.

If you have made a clean install of Windows 7 or 8.1, and you want your computer to upgrade to windows 10, the first thing one needs to do is to activate Windows with a valid license from Microsoft. When Windows is activated, on task bar should appear upgrade icon of windows 10.

Through upgrade icon is not desirable to update Windows, rarely makes a successful upgrade. A better way is through windows update. If the installation of your windows 7 or 8.1 is new, you should not install any applications, especially anti-virus programs.

So if Windows is activated, you need to run Windows Update repeatedly until all of them are not installed.

When all of the updates are installed, there should appear on windows update option “get started” and click on it should start the download of Windows 10.

If nothing appears on windows update you should download media creation tool that is easily found via Google and after its launch will start the upgrade of Windows.

Link for media creation tool:

https://www.microsoft.com/hr-hr/software-download/windows10 

Known issues with existing Windows 7 or 8.1

1. Windows download takes forever
2. Windows download is stuck
3. After downloading windows problem with install because they can not found win boot

Known solutions

1. It is necessary to go on the path C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download to delete cache files of windows update. In short terms you need to delete everything that is in that folder, then open CMD as an administrator and enter exe /updatenow and hit enter, then re-check for updates for windows.

2. Instalation using media creation tool(If you have previously attempted through windows update get Windows 10 it is necessary to delete the two hidden files in the c drive $WINDOWS.~BT, $WINDOWS.~WS)
3. Starting media creation tool and then choose option to download for other computer and thus create iso file upgrade and burn it to CD

4. Follow these instructions

Log in as an administrator.

Press Windows+R, enter regedit and press enter to open the registry editor.

Locate the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade (if it’s missing, create it)

Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value, call it AllowOSUpgrade and set its value to 0x00000001.

Restart the control panel, browse to “Windows Update” and search for updates (if the button from step 6 is not already there).

Now, a button with Getting started should appear. Click on it and follow the instructions to install Windows 10.

The post Windows 10 upgrade problems and solutions appeared first on Procudo.

On one of our locations old server HP ML 350 G6 has become quite obsolete and we decided to upgrade local infrastructure. We bought new HP DL 380 Gen9 with 32 GB RAM one processor and 4 discs of 600GB. Also we have one virtual machine located off-site in the hosting provider’s Datacenter that we wanted to migrate to new server, so that application is located on the client’s premises.

Agenda

1. Firmware upgrades of DL 380 (array P440, Bios etc..) prior installation of VMware
2. Install new ESXi 6 U1 with Essentials license on DL 380
3. Install vCenter 6.0 U1
4. Migrate virtual machines from ESXi 5.0 (free edition) to ESXi 6.0 U1 (Essentials)
5. Export virtual machine from Datacenter and import to ESXi 6.0 U1

Infrastructure

• Local host with version ESXi 5.0 installed on ML 350 G6 (old one)
• Local host with planned ESXi 6.0 U1 installation on DL 380 Gen9 (new one)
• Cloud virtual machine located in hosting datacenter version Vsphere 5.5

1.    Firmware Upgrades of DL 380 Gen9

Before putting server in the production, it’s always smart to update firmwares of all the components in the box, like P440ar RAID controller’s firmware, Bios, Power Management and so on. The easiest way to do this on HP servers is to download HP Service Pack for Proliant. Now that’s a little bit tricky, you have to have active warranty for that server to download SP, and also login for HP pages. Register account if you don’t have it already and in the options of your IT environment link warranty of the server with your account. For warranty you’ll need S/N of the server. After that you should be able to download SP. If you run into any problems during download, registration or any HP related problems in global, I advise you to contact HP business support for which also you’ll need server’s S/N. I used chat support and was really satisfied with responsiveness, and suggestions from their technicians.

Ok, now on to the real work. After successful download we have to mount that ISO onto server. As ISO is 5,5 GB large the only way to do this is with USB or mounting ISO directly to virtual drive of server. We chose second option. For mounting ISO to the server you’ll need ILO configured and connected to the network and ILO advanced license. ILO by default is configured for DHCP so once you plug in network cable you are able to see ILO IP during boot. You can connect to ILO’s IP via internet browser, and login with default credentials that are usually written on the server’s tag. As for the license, we didn’t bought it, so I searched the net for evaluation and found it! On HP pages you can download ILO evaluation license that works for 60 days. Once you apply it you can use virtual drive. To mount ISO go to the Remote Console in the ILO management and start it. Once new browser window opens, in the top left corner you can chose option to mount ISO, and browse for the file that is somewhere locally on the network, accessible from the ILO’s IP. Chose Automatic update, if you want everything to be updated without selecting specific component.

The one thing that is most important, was not updated to the latest firmware, and that is RAID controller P440ar. So we downloaded offline update bundle from support pages, for this to apply to the server we first had to install ESXi! One other important thing that we noticed is that HP Smart Storage Administrator (HP SSA) was also not updated, and because of that it was lacking some very important options like expanding existing array. Scenario when you create array i.e. RAID 5, install all the things on it, and after you run out of free space you want to add additional disc to expand that array, was not possible!! We figured out that once you boot to ISO image HP Service Pack(virtual drive, remember:-) there is newer version of HP SSA and all the options were there! I asked HP support is it possible to update HP SSA so that we can boot from server, without image, they replied no. We didn’t investigate further is it possible or not. So you have two options after you deploy your server, if you are adding new disc to the array. Boot into newest HP Service Pack SSA (offline), or expand array via HP SSA cli on the ESXi (online), also there is posible third option but I didn’t try it, login to http:/serverIP:2301, I guess you’ll have to open firewall ports of ESXi. The last option is the web component of HP SSA.

2.    Install ESXi 6 Essentials on DL 380

If you have HP server the only right way to install ESXi is with HP ESXi Custom Image. That image contains prepared drivers for all the components, and besides that it also contains HP tools and utilities like HP SSA mentioned before. To use those tools you will have to have ESXi SSH access, and get familiar with the Command Line Interface reference guides of the tool you want to use.

Before installation, we had to create logical array. In HP SSA interface we created RAID 5 with all four discs and select maximum capacity. We mounted ESXi HP custom image via virtual drive, and booted to the installation.

After Installation of ESXi we encountered on interesting problem. Server didn’t boot. It was in constant loop saying “No bootable device were detected please attach a uefi bootable device”. We spent more than 2 hours on support with HP and investigating on our own. P440ar was not even in the boot devices in BIOS. Finally we figured out that the problem was option in the HP SSA, boot from logical volume was on NONE! We changed that to our newly created array and got it work!

Now that we have fresh install of ESXi 6 U1, we had to complete update of the P440ar firmware. We downloaded offline bundle from HP support pages,copied it to the ESXi server, enable SSH, started SSH deamon, and connected. Via esx cli we unpacked and installed firmware.

3.    Install Vcenter 6 U1

There are multiple scenarios of installing Vcenter, we decided to go with the Vcenter Appliance, which we deployed to a new DL 380 Gen9. You have to have VMware account connected to your license to acquire download.

After download of ISO image, first thing you should do is unpack it on the client machine from which you are performing deployment. In the ISO image there is Client Integration Plugin, which needs to be installed on the client machine from which you manage vcenter. After successful installation, start vcsa-setup.html, which will take you through the configuration of the Vcenter Appliance. Options are more or less basic and understoodable, I just want to point out one little catch that is good to know. Prior configuring vcsa, you should create A record in your DNS! In other words you should be able to ping vcenter. During installation when you’re asked for FQDN you should put vcenter.your.domain. Also one other thing to have in mind is, you have to remember you Master SSO password, because I didn’t found article how to reset it. And final hint, log in would be administrator@SSO.Domain with password that you entered during installation.

4.    Migrate virtual machines from ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 6.0 U1

Now that we have vcenter we can add our host to it so that we can easily migrate VMs. New ESXi 6 host is not the problem because we have license for Essentials, and also when you install ESXi you get 60 days trial so you have Vcenter Server Agents. But for adding the old one we had to do a little trick. As old one was free edition it didn’t had support for Vcenter. Our solutions was to acquire new trial license for ESXi 5 and apply it to the old host. You’ll have to search a bit on VMware pages to found old downloads, and get trial key, when you get it apply it to old host first by removing the following lines:

1. /etc/vmware/vmware.lic
2. /etc/vmware/license.cfg

and after that by applying new license trough Vsphere client.

Now that we had both hosts in the Vcenter we could easily move VMs from old datastore (local datastore!) on the old server to the new datastore (also local) on the new server. Yes we didn’t have shared storage. After successful migration we could reinstall old server 5.0 with new license that we bought 6.0 U1 Essentials and add the host server back to the Vcenter.

Just to point out that before this solution we tried a bit different approach. Copying VM files trough shell, with SCP. But because the nature of ESXi shell and limitation on resources that it uses we couldn’t get reasonable speed of copy from host to host. For comparison 30GB of data copying from host to host with SCP lasted cca 160min, migration from host (datastore) to host (datastore) within Vcenter lasted around 8min!

5.    Export virtual machine from Cloud Datacenter Vsphere 5.5 and import to ESXi 6.0 U1

One last thing that needed to be done is export virtual machine from vSphere 5.5 located in the Datacenter, and import it locally to the new infrastructure, Vcenter and two hosts.

To jump right to the point, on the one and only important thing that we learned the hard way. When you want to export VM to OVF or OVA, make sure that there is no ISO image attached in the VM’s virtual drive. Go to VM options and on the CD/DVD under Device Type choose Client Device! If you don’t do this your import will fail with the misleading error “Canceled By The User”. If you forgot to change the settings like we did, you can still get this fixed by tweaking the files. There is a good post on the VMware community pages dealing with this problem.

That’s it, thank you for reading!

The End.

The post ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 6.0 U1 – Installation, Configuration and Migration appeared first on Procudo.

Definition of the problem

In this article there will be elements of brute force on web sites that are created inside of wordpress. Facts which indicate that web site is compromised will be shown throught article, also it will be explained how to protect yourselfe against brute force.

Introduction

Web site which are we using as an example is our client and it will not be named.

Problem analysis

The easiest way to detect brute force on web site is throught IT security. The trick is that there is an option settings inside IT security, throught which you can get notifications if someone is trying to get into your site. Only thing that is required is to write your e-mail in textbox bellow.

If this option is not included, it is difficult to notice that someone is trying to compromised your website, as long as your site does not collapse or somethig like that.

Mainly the lack of free space on hosting provider is the reason for some web site to collapse and accumulation of new data leads to such situations. Primarily to the lack of space on the hosting provider leads the accumulation of logs.

We are talking about huge amounts of an attempts to logging on to the admin section of WordPress, and a constant lockout of an admin section of the page.

Examples of logs after intrusion attempts on the website

The reason that lockout occurs is because the user name can be easily learned by using their ID’s. Hacker randomly enteres different values of IDs until it reaches the user names. The most common is ID number 1.

Solution to the problem

In order to ensure against further attacks, it is necessary to implement a part of the code in the .htaccess.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-admin [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} author=\d
RewriteRule ^ /? [L,R=301]

This code will prevent hackers from reaching the user names. In fact if hacker already used existing user names, it is necessary to change them. User names can be changed in phpMyAdmin under option users. It is only necessary to change user_login but not nicename. Also it is preferable not to have too many user names.

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