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Pi-hole & Spotify

I recently setup Pi-hole on my old Raspberry Pi (Model B)

What’s Pi-hole you ask? 

It’s basically a DNS server that runs on your Raspberry Pi. You first need to install Rasbian O/S on your Pi.

Once this is done, with one command line you can download and install Pi-hole.

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Once Pi-hole is setup, you will need to login to your Router and make sure you point all client’s DNS server to the Pi-hole IP address. I also placed my Router IP as a secondary DNS just in case the Raspberry Pi is unplugged.

It has a few advantages such as:

  • Blocking over 100,000 domains (including ad’s)
  • Improved network performance
  • Web based admin interface and stats (Gotta love stats!)
  • Ability to white/black list domains.

After setting up Pi-hole, I noticed I couldn’t access Spotify (on our iphones) anymore.

The Fix: Remember to login to Pi-hole (e.g http://192.168.x.x/admin/index.php), find your client IP address. Here you can find all the domains being accessed by the client IP and white-list the spotify ones.

e.g

spclient.wg.spotify.com

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Battery report

Today I learnt you can use the following command to create a battery report.

powercfg /batteryreport

What’s included in the battery report?

  • It provides recent usage information e.g when the notebook was charged and the power states over the last 3 days. When your notebook started, when it was suspended and the battery capacity over time.
  • Battery details such as brand, design capacity, full charge capacity and cycle count.
  • Battery usage graph showing how the battery drained over time.
  • Battery life estimate stats.
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RSAT Win 10 1511 Issue

If you are like me and are using Win 10 1511 and have installed RSAT you will notice the tab’s inside ADUC are missing.

This is due to a bug with RSAT version v1.2 published 12/10/2016.

Solution: Upgrade to a higher build of Win 10 e.g 1607 Anniversary edition. You may be able to try and find an earlier version of RSAT, this may work also. If you find a link to the older version please let me know and I’ll post it here.

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WSUS Offline Update

What is WSUS Offline Update you ask?

WSUS Offline Update allows you to update any computer or server without needing an internet connection. Run the updategenerator.exe to download the updates and then run updateinstaller.exe on the pc/server you want to update.

This would be very handy if you do alot of onsite work and the person/business doesn’t have a WSUS server, or no internet connection or slow internet.

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Win 10 update broke DHCP / getting an IP address

Last week Microsoft quietly fixed a Windows update it recently released which prevents users from getting an IP and connecting to the Internet.

People are pointing the issue to update KB3201845 released on Dec 9 2016, which appears to break DHCP. This prevents Win 10 from automatically getting an IP address from the network.

KB4004227 has been released to resolve this issue.

“Note: This issue is limited to PCs running Windows 10 version 1607 that have not been restarted recently, and with network adapters unexpectedly showing an IP address in the 169.x.x.x range. ”

More info on MS forums.

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Visio available for the web and iPad

Visio Viewer for iPad and Visio Online Preview has been released.

This will allow users to share and access diagrams from a web browser or iPad (iPhone app is coming soon).

It looks like you will be able to add realtime data into the online visio, allowing you to have a realtime map of your diagrams/networks.

You will need access to a Microsoft account or home/school Office 365 subscription.

For more details see the Microsoft link here.

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ChangeIP.com down

Looks like changeip.com are down.

Service Status

Sunday 12/11/2016 at 1PM PT we experienced a database failure that cascaded through all of our redundant systems.
At 2PM PT we started the process of restoring data from systems backup. Unfortunately due to the size of the database
the restore process is taking much longer than anticipated. Once the database restore process is complete, systems
operations will be returned to normal.