IT-Operations in Corona Mode

Having a pandemia raging on full throttle, shutting down society and major parts of business life is of course a real IT challenge. The challenge grows, when the according IT is homed in an basically ongoing business, facing a complete shift in its mode of operation.

This leaves the IT-departement with two major challenges, I want to discuss today:

  1. Organize a resilient and disaster tolerant IT organisation
  2. Adapt to the quick changes in business needs, user needs and user behavior

Resilient organisation of structure and workflow within an IT operations team is today not necessarily an incredible complex thing, since many tools and methods should be available anyway. On top it Continue reading

HowTo: Broken SMB Communication through PanOs 8.1. Firewalls Fix

Anybody who installed PanOS 8.1 on his Palo Alto firewall – we use the PA 220 in quite some numbers, may have experienced quite some strange behaviour if through IPSEC tunnels connected file shares user SMB. So did I.

With the latest firmware upgrade, no write or read jobs through any of these VPN tunnels succeded. The mapped drives lit up in the file explorer. in some cases even browsing directories may have succeded … perhaps even two or three levels down. Then the explorer started to hang, crashed, even some systems blue screened. Copied files showed perhaps up in the destination with a filename aka. directory entry but never any content showed up.

Since we updated the Microsoft world on top, the assumption some backward compatibility stack or group policy setting may have caused the headache. Many Continue reading