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Get rid of the “Updates are available” pop-up

The Updates are available popup is the source of much irritation for anyone remotely administering windows 10, Server 2012 and server 2016

To get around this popup – which lets face it, is just downright inconvenient; we need to stop the exe file that produces this window from running. Code below, with comments preceded by a #

Run command prompt as administrator (elevated) and enter these commands:

#change directory to system32
cd /d "%Windir%\System32"

#Take over permissions owner to current admin
takeown /f musnotification.exe

#Change permissions to deny anyone/system running from it
icacls musnotification.exe /deny Everyone:(X)

#Take over permissions owner to current admin
takeown /f musnotificationux.exe

#Change permissions to deny anyone/system running from it
icacls musnotificationux.exe /deny Everyone:(X)

You will see form the above, that there are two processes ‘musnotificationux.exe’ and ‘musnotification.exe’ that are responsible for querying updates and notifying the end user. The great part of this fix, is that it will not interfere with any update processes themselves, just the notifications. So have no fear – updates will still continue to function as normal, just now without this troublesome pop-up.

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Recover or reset PFSense Admin password

I’ll keep this post short and sweet, you have lost your PFsense firewall/router Admin login password and need back in. Quick.

There are two options available to you:

To reset PFSense Admin password

Plug a monitor and keyboard into the PFSense appliance/server or connect to console
You can then select ‘Option 3) to reset the webGUI password.

Should this fail, or you have set an admin password to even get this far, then follow below;

1, Reboot appliance
2, Select boot option for ‘Single User Mode’
3, Hit enter to start /bin/sh
3, run mount -a -t ufs
4, run /etc/rc.initial.password and follow the prompts to reset password
5, reboot /sbin/reboot

Depending on what version o PFSense you are using, you will have just specified the new password, or if you did not have that option, then it will have reset to the PFSense default password of: Admin | pfsense

Let me know in the comments if this helped you or was useful to you in any way!

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WordPress redirect loop when using CloudFlare – err_too_many_redirects [Solved]

As a wordpress user, or hosting admin i’m sure you have seen it before – the dreaded err_too_many_redirects page.

This is caused by a number of issues, including:

  • Domain name change
  • Changing SSL certificate
  • Incorrect URL configuration
  • Server misconfiguration
  • .htaccess errors
  • Cookie issues
  • Reverse proxy issues
  • HTTPS issues
  • Plugin malfunctions
  • Bad WordPress upgrades
  • Server file permission issues
  • The list goes on, but you get the message…

There are countless reasons that could cause this error, and most of them are easily fixable with a quick google. However Yesterday i came across a new one.

WordPress, Cloudflare & Shared Hosting

If you came here for the Solution here it is:

Edit your wp-config.php file and at the bottom add:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_PROTO'], 'https') !== false)
$_SERVER['HTTPS']='on';

So what causes this?

Well, in this case it was a combination of things, this is very specific to three things in this environment. 1) Shared Hosting. 2)No root SSL Certificate. 3)CloudFlare ‘Always use HTTPS’ settings.

After taking a step back and working out the basics of what i had, and why other ‘fixes’ that usually work, weren’t- i realised what i had here, was a simply reverse proxy. That is, that where the files are hosted without SSL, but the reverse proxy (in this case CloudFlare) was using SSL.

Finally, i found this nugget in the WordPress Codex:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Administration_Over_SSL#Using_a_Reverse_Proxy

And it all clicked.

“If WordPress is hosted behind a reverse proxy that provides SSL, but is hosted itself without SSL, these options will initially send any requests into an infinite redirect loop.

And that is why we need to tell wordpress to force SSL to prevent this WordPress redirect loop when using CloudFlare.

Hope that someone finds this helpful!

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DMARC with quotes or without? [SOLVED]

Does my DMARC record need to include quotation marks or not?

9/10 times, no quotes are needed.

However, this all depends on where you edit your DNS.

In the raw DNS zone file, which is what is passed from machine to machine, the .txt record DOES need to be enclosed in quotation marks if it contains spaces. It is unlikely that your domain/DNS provider however will give you direct edit access to this, and instead will be providing their own interface to edit entries with pre-built in quotation marks. Exceptions to this can be found when directly editing via CLI at the root of a server, or when using the raw edit mode on WHM.

For example, Cloudflare will automatically wrap any string of text in a .TXT record in quotes for you, and remove extra quotes you may add,

namesco however will not automatically remove extra quotations to their already provided ones – which could lead to double quotations, and issues further down the line.

It pretty much boils down to your provider, it is best to have a quick skim of their DNS Q&A section – or to test by trial and error!

My favorite testing site is currently https://mxtoolbox.com/DMARC.aspx