Telescope dovetail mount

I’m building a telescope, of which more anon. I don’t want to build a mount for it, so I’m going to use my existing Mead GOTO mount. This means that:

  • I want to be able to attach the new telescope to the existing mount
  • The telescope needs to be able to slide in the mount to get the right balance. This is particularly important as the new telescope will be heavier than the 90mm Mead telescope.
  • I want to be able to attach the Mead telescope to the GOTO mount too.

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Windows Update with PowerShell

We generally connect to backend servers via a jump-box or bastion host. On Windows this means RDP into the jump-box, then RDP from the jump-box to the backend server. However, recently a Windows update meant that the jump-box (which had the update) couldn’t RDP to the backend server (which hadn’t got the update). No RDP => no access to update the VM to restore RDP. Lots of fun!

In that case I managed to use Remmina from a Linux box to access the backend directly; however since we are going to hit this issue again we needed a better fix.

Cue PowerShell; this is deployed via Octopus so will work when RDP doesn’t. As an additional perk it means updating becomes much easier.
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Authenticating Linux with Active Directory using SSSD

Sometimes it is handy if users are managed somewhere other than /etc/passwd – somewhere central. Sometimes this happens to be Active Directory.

This post describes an approach on Debian Jessie against AD on Windows 2016 based on this excellent RedHat Guide’s Configuration 3 – SSSD/Kerberos/LDAP. It works very well for me. If you use a Debian-based distribution (Ubuntu, Debian etc) then hopefully it will work for you too.

I originally published this data on the Debian Wiki; I intend to expand it somewhat here.

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