I don’t know whats going on in the past few weeks but the sheer amount of zeroday exploits via email have risen. To protect yourselves against this I would recommend setting up a transport rule to drop or reject any email with executable content. This can be done for Exchange 2013 or Office365 (Exchange Online).

1. Login to Exchange Admin Center using administrative credentials
2. On the left pane select “Mail flow”
3. On the top pane select " Rules"
4. Click on the “+” sign and select create a new rule
5. Give a name to the rule and select “more options” …

While continuing to build out my lab for VCAP-DCA today I had to deploy the vMA (vSphere Management Assistant). Upon deployment i tried to SSH to it and unfortunately was not able to. By default SSH is turned off, perform the steps below to enable it.

1. Logon to vMA via a Console Session
2. Run

• ‘sudo vi /etc/hosts.allow’

3. Scroll to the very bottom and type i to insert content into the file.
4. On the last line add 

• ‘sshd: ALL: ALLOW’

Building out some new servers today I came across an issue where the servers would have no network connectivity even though the vNICs were properly tagged and assign a VLAN ID. Upon further research, I noticed that “Native VLAN” was not selected. This is a must for any operating system that does not do VLAN Tagging such as ESXi.

So remember to set the VLAN to Native if using an operating system that does not support VLAN tagging!

I was working today on configuring NFS/Openfiler in my lab and came across an issue that my nested ESXi host’s couldn’t talk over the VSS (Standard Switch) I created. Upon further research when using nested ESXi you need to enable “Promiscuous Mode” on the VSS to allow the traffic to pass.