Remotely manage a Sonicwall firewall over a VPN tunnel

July 25, 2013 Leave a comment

Earlier I was looking to remotely manage a Sonicwall firewall via HTTPS over a VPN tunnel that I had established to the device. In order to do this firstly select ‘VPN’ in the Sonicwall’s menu, the ‘Settings’ section should then be highlighted. Click the ‘configure’ button for the VPN tunnel that you want to manage the device over, which will open the settings screen for that VPN Policy. Next click the ‘Advanced’ tab, and look for the section labelled ‘Management via this SA’.  Check the boxes for protocols that you wish to manage the device over, and click OK, as shown below.

Allow remote management via HTTPS and SSH over a VPN tunnel on a Sonicwall Firewall

Allow remote management via HTTPS and SSH over a VPN tunnel on a Sonicwall Firewall

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Empty a log file in Linux

July 22, 2013 Leave a comment

I needed to empty a log file on one of my Linux boxes today as it had grown to 7.5 GB in size. This was achieved by simply running the following command in the directory where the problem file exists, and LOG_FILE was the name of the file to be emptied:

cat /dev/null > LOG_FILE

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“Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes” on a Lenovo Laptop

July 12, 2013 3 Comments

I recently had to apply Windows updates to a new Lenovo laptop running Windows 8. There were about 50 or so updates to apply, but each time I tried to install them I received the following error message on reboot:

“Failure configuring Windows Updates. Reverting Changes”

After the reboot had completed, I examined the update history and found that none of the updates had installed and all were marked as failed. I did a bit of digging, and in the end it turned out that this is a common problem with Lenovo laptops and was caused by a service called the ‘Nalpeiron Licensing Service’. I am not sure why this is pre installed, but it appears that it is not an essential service, so I simply opened the services console (services.msc) and stopped and then disabled this service. After completing this action Windows updates installed without error.

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