Posts from January 2017

Philips Hue Scene Control with Vera Z-Wave Scenes

For a little while now, I have been buying Philips Hue light bulbs for home. I haven’t gone too overboard just yet but one of the starting factors was being able to set some coloured lighting in the living room and in the kitchen to be able to provide a bit of flashing light action for those long summer nights with a drink or two and friends.

At Christmas, I was able to get myself a Vera Edge Z-Wave controller as I really wanted to start making better use of the Hue bulbs and integrating it with Z-Wave to setup some nice home automation scenarios. After getting Vera online and getting the Hue2 plugin installed and control of the bulbs, I started to struggle. What I quickly noticed was that when trying to use Z-Wave Scenes in Vera to operate groups of Hue bulbs, I wasn’t able to and instead had to chain up actions which had an undesired effect of each bulb turning on in order with a second or so delay between each. Compared with Hue scenes where you press it and the whole room lights up, this wasn’t great.

Tonight however, I managed to find the answer and get it working just so with a little bit of effort here and there. I wasn’t able to find this information easily on the MiCaseVerde forums so I thought I would post it here in the hope that someones Google search turns it up for them.

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RDS and the Case of the Mistaken PKI OID

Earlier this morning, I was working with our support team to work out an issue they were having in an environment where Remote Desktop Services had stopped working. Trying to connect to a server via RDS simply failed with a Network Level Authentication warning, strange, given it was a domain environment and everything should be trusted and all good. The issue started life as support seeing Event ID 1058 and Event ID 36870 errors in the event log and they had been looking at https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askperf/2014/10/22/rdp-fails-with-event-id-1058-event-36870-with-remote-desktop-session-host-certificate-ssl-communication/ for guidance to this point with no success.

I quickly discovered that a GPO had recently been implemented that enforced NLA for RDS and also assigned a certificate template to use for Remote Desktop instead of the default self-signed version. I hopped onto the certificate authority to check out the certificate template that had been configured and compared it to the recommendations of the Microsoft article for assigning certificates to RDS sessions at https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2010/04/09/configuring-remote-desktop-certificates/ as this is an article I have referred to before and know it works.

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Working Hard on Web Security

As anyone who visits my site on a regular basis may have noticed, I’ve been working hard on securing up this blog to make it follow more best practices and more in keeping with modern web security given it’s been quite a while since I’ve touched that side of the site, and there have been numerous things that I have implemented and I thought I would give a little run down of them.

Read on after the fold for the low down on each of the features and how it works.

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