| Sys Admin Extraordinaire |

2018-09-05 Initial Post

SEE will not work on certain models of computers that have Intel Rapid Storage (sometimes spelled Restore) Technology set to RAID. You must change that to AHCI prior to installing the OS. After the OS is installed, you may install SEE and start encryption. If you try to encrypt while the system is still set to RAID, encryption will not begin - it just won't work and there's no obvious error message.

From my understanding, the issue is because the pre-boot OS used by SEE does not have the drivers to access the Intel RAID volumes. Even Windows PE 10 does not have the drivers so I had to download the drivers for the laptops listed below and run drvload.exe to install them on the fly after booting up to WinPE (e.g. drvload.exe iaAHCIC.inf).

• Dell XPS 13 9360
• Dell XPS 13 9365
• Dell Precision 7730

Also, in Windows 10, BitLocker may be enabled and need to be activated, then the drive must be decrypted before SEE will work properly. If the Windows 10 image was just loaded, it will take a while for the drive to finish encrypting with BitLocker - let it complete, then activate BitLocker (this basically involves saving the encryption key) and then decrypt the drive. Once the drive is completely BitLocker decrypted, you may install SEE and encrypt with it.

Some Symantec KBs for reference:

Systems unable to boot properly after Encrypting disk with Symantec Drive Encryption when BIOS set to RAID On

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH233048.html

Best Practices: Symantec Endpoint Encryption and Symantec Drive Encryption

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH149543.html

2013-03-01 Initial Post

Microsoft's Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) is a type of certification authority (CA) (a lot of people misspell that as "certificate" authority). A CA issues x.509 (a standard for digital certificates) formatted certificates for computer security purposes. When an organization sets up its own Certificate Services infrastructure, that essentially becomes its public key infrastructure (PKI). ADCS functions as a CA in a PKI and the CA and all its supporting systems are the PKI. You might see all three terms used interchangeably, and many documents just refer to a server running ADCS as "the CA." (more…)

2012-07-29 Initial Post

I played around with this back in January 2012 with version 0.3.7, using it with a Logitech QuickCam Deluxe for Notebooks model V-UBV49.

Basically I wanted to set up a video surveillance system and this seemed to be one of the better free programs for doing such. It has some nice features for a free program, but it needs some work. I ended up getting a camera with built-in motion detection--see my post on that at http://sysadmin-e.com/x10-airsight-clones.

Here are some misc notes I made about Yawcam. This isn't very extensive and I'm just posting it for my own reference.

• C:\Users\%username%\.yawcam\
• You can define an area for motion detection. The area is based on the current frame, so if you move the camera, you need to reselect the area.
• You can add an overlay to the capture (such as text with the date and time).
• It has a scheduling feature.
• Too much sun washes out the motion detection area (not the software's fault).
• It temporarily saves motion activated images to C:\Users\%username%\.yawcam\motion even if you specified another location. The images there get deleted after clearing/deleting the events from the Window menu --> Motion Detection --> Motion Events tab.

2012-06-30 Updated

2012-01-25 Initial post

I was thinking of getting the X10 AirSight Wireless IP Camera and had a $15 off discount code, so it would have cost $85, which seemed like a good price for the features. I was about to get it but fortunately I found out that there are clones of this exact same cam. Note that even though the clones share the exact same hardware, the software and instructions vary. (more…)

2012-02-02 Updated

2012-01-23 Initial post

One of our application administrators asked me to help him troubleshoot why LDAP user authentication didn't work correctly in his application, Oracle Agile PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) 9.3.1. I decided to look into LDAP authentication a little more and here are some notes I made. I wasn't able to find a nice simple article that answers this question: How is LDAP user authentication handled in AD? (more…)