Upgrading to pfSense 23.05.1-RELEASE on our Netgate SG-4860 caused the device to encounter an interrupt loop, leading to higher than usual CPU usage. This is actually mentioned in the release notes for pfSense 23.01: Devices based on “ADI” or “RCC” hardware, such as the 4860, 8860, and potentially other similar models, may have issues with the ichsmb0 and/or ehci0 devices encountering an interrupt loop, leading to higher than usual CPU usage (NG 8916). Despite that I never actually had any issues with pfSense 23.01, however upgrading to 23.05.1 caused this issue. Everything otherwise worked fine, so this was on my to look in to list due to having other projects ongoing. Anyway about two weeks later it would appear /var/log/system.log is now 17gb and our SG-4860 has run out of storage, meaning no configuration settings can be saved. I also could not access the console over a serial connection as I was simply spammed with “ichsmb0: interrupt loop, status=0x60” and unable to type anything, so not an ideal situation to be in. However the web-ui still functioned so I could access Diagnostics > Command Prompt du -Pshx /* allowed me to figure out something in /var was using all the…

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog post, two and a half years it appears (or 938 days if we’re been exact!)

My last blog post was back in 2018 on EU Domains To Be Revoked From UK Citizens, Faith In .EU Domains Lost, this was rather concerning as I had no real desire to move away from my .eu domain name, it was short and summed up where in the world I was blogging from.

Needless to say this is one of the reasons that put me off blogging, what was the point if one day I’d loose that domain and not even be able to redirect any traffic to a newer domain? In addition I had various online accounts associated with this domain, so knowing I could loose the rights to it due to a political event, such as the UK leaving the EU was very concerning.

Office 365 Exchange Online Plan 1 is great for hosting email on your personal domain. At £36 a year, aka £3 per month you get an enterprise grade Exchange inbox.

However if you have setup your domain in the Microsoft 365 admin center, then try to change the primary email address on your Microsoft Account to an email address hosted with Office 365 Exchange, you are greeted with the following error: “You can’t add a work or school email address as an alias to a personal Microsoft account. Please try another.”

So basically if your paying Microsoft to host email for your personal domain, you then can’t associate your Microsoft account with any email address on that domain, or can you?

Years ago when looking at choosing a domain for my personal email and blog, I looked at various different domain options. In the end I settled on matthill.me.uk as it was available. Another perceived benefit was .eu was shorter to type than .com or co.uk (not that my name was available for either TDL’s).

I had little desire to purchase a vanity domain such as .blog for example, many of these are controlled by companies, which might not exist in the future, or significantly increase their prices at a later date. As you might have noticed many of these vanity domains get very expensive after the first year.

Microsoft have released the ADMX templates for the Windows 10 1703 Creators Update. Updating your ADMX templates will allow you to configure GPO objects specific to the Windows 10 1703 Creators Update. In addition if you are using Server 2012 for example and have never installed any previous ADMX Templates For Windows 10, installing this ADMX Template update will give you the ability to configure Windows 10 Group Policy settings.