Whoops! WordPress Stuck in Maintenance Mode

It’s good to keep your WordPress instance up-to-date. But sometimes it doesn’t go to plan. Recently, this very instance got stuck in maintenance mode after an update.

It’s an easy fix! Logging into my cPanel, I found a .maintenance file in the root of my public_html folder where my WordPress instance is located. I deleted the file and voila, functioning, updated WordPress!

Invalid Login Attempt Accessing Netsuite using REST API

I banged my head against the desk for way too long trying to figure out this issue. While trying to authenticate with Netsuite’s REST API instead of SOAP, I got the same INVALID_LOGIN_ATTEMPT error.

The fix? My account ID, which was a sandbox and included the letters S and B, had to be capitalized. I was using lowercase letters. Changing them to uppercase letters did the job!

Why, Netsuite, Why?

Expand Ubuntu Disk / Partition after Hyper-V Disk Expansion

I have an Ubuntu VM running in Hyper-V (or HyperV if you’re lazy) that I had to expand. I used the GUI in Hyper-V Manager to add some space first and rebooted my VM. After that I was able to utilize the new space by following these steps:

First, open Up Disks app and make sure your “VM” is seeing the free space

Look at the beautiful free space

After that, open up terminal and install some cloud tools that’ll help us out.

sudo apt-get install cloud-guest-utils

After that, run this command to use all that sweet new space.

sudo growpart /dev/sda 1

That’s it! It grew to use all the free space and we were good to go.

Ubuntu – Cannot Mount Share – Read-Only

I ran into this one today on a fresh Ubuntu install. I was attempting to mount my NAS and configured fstab. I went to mount the share and got this error:

mount: /media/Data: cannot mount //[SHARE]/Data read-only.

The fix was to install cifs-utils via apt-get install cifs-utils

Afterwards, I was able to mount the share successfully. Of course, there may be a few other causes for this error so be sure you fit this scenario.

SOLVED: Missing Office365 for Web App Tiles / Links

A real hand-banger of an issue thanks to Microsoft’s love for hiding settings behind classic admin centers. After enabling Office for Web and OneDrive (or Sharepoint) for several users, they were unable to edit Office documents in Office Online / Office Web Apps via www.office.com. They didn’t even show up!

What Was Being Seen:

Where the apps at?

What Should Be Seen:

Apps showing in better times

The resolution was classic Microsoft. After making sure that the users had the correct applications assigned, namely Office Apps for Web and either SharePoint or OneDrive, we had to navigate to the SharePoint Admin Center, click on Settings, and then classic settings.

Once there, the first option was the cause of our trouble. Make sure you don’t hide the icons!

Forwarding Ubiquiti Cameras Over WAN / Double-NAT

I’ve had to do this at a job recently that had to monitor access to sensitive offices and vaccines. This works internally (with a double-NAT) or over WAN with a change or two

Essentially, the steps are:

1) Setup camera with static, local IP

2) Login to camera and configure NVR IP as the WAN IP of the UDM Pro / NVR

3) Login to UDM Pro and configure WAN Local Firewall Rule to allow all traffic from static IP you set in Step 1 (if going over WAN, use WAN IP of location with Ubiquiti camera)

4) Login to Protect app in UDM Pro, add camera

Enable / Allow Sending From an Alias in Office365

The long-requested ability to send emails from an alias in Office 365 has been finally released!

When you use an alias to send an email, the From and Reply to field for the recipient will appear to be the alias meaning the recipient will only see the alias and not your primary email address.

To make this happen, simply login to your Office365 tenant via Powershell and run the following command:

Set-OrganizationConfig -SendFromAliasEnabled $true

That’s it! Within a few minutes it should begin working.

To send from the alias, make sure you are showing the From field by clicking Options > From, shown below

Voila!

More information can be found on Microsoft’s website

Testing Office365 Mail Rules

Recently I had to implement a tag for external emails. However, I wanted to test it out first and see what would be tagged.

I created my rule and set these settings:

Audit this rule… should be checked off but can be set to “Not specified” while the mode should be Test without Policy Tips.

Ok the rule.

Wait a day, then go to to the Reports section of Office365 Security & Compliance Center. On the Dashboard, click on the Exchange transport rule section.

Once there, click the dropdown for “Show data for” and choose your transport rule. This will only list transport rules where you have checked off Audit this rule with severity level: . No matter the setting, that must be checked off or you won’t see results here!

That’s it. Filter by sender, date, etc. and you’ll see the emails affected by the rule. Happy hunting!

Using the New Exchange Admin Center (2020 Edition)

I’ve noted this as the 2020 edition because simply… Microsoft loves to change their GUIs and portals. If you’ve worked with Office365 for a long time, you can remember the BPOS days and all the subsequent portals.

Anywho, the link for Exchange Admin is more in-line with the Sharepoint and Teams admin portals and is easier to remember: https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com/

As of this writing, it’s… pretty blank when you arrive there. You can still run message traces through here. One of the bigger changes is they’ve combined User and Shared Mailboxes under Mailboxes and put distribution lists and Office365 groups under Groups. Resource Mailboxes are under Resources.

As of now, I still work out of PowerShell or the old admin center. This will probably be finished by late next year… just in time for the next version of the EAC to apprear.