Looking at network slowness, I noticed a lot of overrun errors and an inexplicable amount of broadcast traffic. Running a sniffer trace … these tuya bulbs announce themselves in a constant loop. We’ll add a network filter for now, but some other firmware on these bulbs would be great!
Sept 5, 2022 – May 13, 2026
When Patches and the four kittens would come to eat and play on our back patio, we noticed that they never really meowed. And then, on October 28, 2022 — we heard a little kitten meow. The little gray kitten had been left behind – the cat Scott had decided was the coolest one. We got a little trap and baited it with cat food and tuna bits. And caught our little Ash.
We petted him and fed him, and he would curl up on one of us to be extra warm to take a nap. He had the loudest purr I’ve ever heard. You could hear from across the room whenever he was happy. And he was so happy. He loved to be scratched at – ruffling up his fur, then smoothing it back down so he was a sleek, tiny panther again.
He was a spooky cat, very skittish until he got to know and love you. I’d hang out with Anya in her room and play with her while Ash was in her room. One day, we were laying on the bed and he climbed up on my leg. Froze when I looked at him, so I looked away. He walked up my leg and onto my back. Then there was a little kitten head poking over my shoulder. He learned to trust me. Inside! I could pick him up, pet him, and play with him. It took a while before he would come up to me outside. I was cleaning a spot to plant some comfrey and asparagus over by the orchard. Crawling around on the ground, picking out all the weeds. He slowly made his way over to me, creeping closer and closer, and eventually wanted to be petted. I took a long break to talk to him, pet him, and snuggle him. Since then, when I’d go outside, he would usually stop whatever he was doing to run over and greet me.
He had a great smile and always looked thrilled when one of his “people” came outside to hang out. He’d run up with a happy murr-ur. Follow me and ‘help’. He’d even brave the giant growly lawnmower monster to follow me around the yard when I’d use the push-mower. We’d walk over to the chicken coop to let the chickens and turkeys out, he’d come back to the house with me, and then he’d go do cat things for the day. In the winter, he’d carefully follow behind me in the trail I broke through the snow, while his brother would bound across the foot-deep snow into the woods. He’d come with Anya and I as we gathered maple syrup – going from the back woods to the farm, and back to the house. He ducked into the covered cub cadet with us when it started raining, walked along the river as Anya looked for rocks, and was always on the look for chipmunks to pounce on. He’d follow me a lot inside, too. Walking up to the laundry room to get more cat food, bring laundry from the drier into my bedroom and fold it, then back downstairs. Or back and forth into the pantry while I gathered ingredients for dinner.
He was the snuggliest cat I’ve ever met. He would weave between my legs while I was walking outside; I frequently picked him up, held him, and petted him as I walked somewhere. He’d nuzzle his forehead under my chin or scan the yard for prey. If he saw a bird, he’d leap from my arms to try and get it. He loved getting his belly petted. His belly had the softest, silkiest fur. And he was growing two white patches – one on his chest and one farther down on his abdomen. They were getting bigger as he got older, and I thought he might turn into Ash the White like Gandolf.
He was such a smart cat. He learned how to open the garage door to follow me inside when I needed to grab some tools. As I was going through the drawers, trying to find something, I heard a creaky noise behind me. Turning around, the garage door was open and he came trotting over purring and asking to be petted. He would open the laundry room door, so we had to lock it at bedtime.
We used to have trouble rounding the cats up at night, but I got canned cat food. We started bringing them inside at night and giving them canned food for “dinner”. He loved kitten dinner time. Rarely had trouble getting Ash to come in at night. He’d come with us to round up the birds and happily run into the house for dinner.
He loved butchering day – the best farm cat day of the year. He would get excited if I picked up the big, white cutting boards and carry them toward the family room door. It’s hard to walk when you’ve got two 18×30 pieces of plastic in your hands and a big, strong cat weaving between your legs and purring at you. The first butchering day, Ash and Dumplin were so hyper after eating the trim meat I’d throw for them. Zooming around the yard and running up trees. Ash climbed so high on one of the big trees that Anya was worried he wouldn’t get down safely.
He’d climb the ornamental pine at the corner of the garage and hop onto the roof. Looking from the driveway, there’d be a cat walking around on the roof.
As he got a little older, he liked to come into the family room for a nap during the day. He’d sleep on the sofa, either in Anya’s spot while she was at school or snuggled up next to me. When the weather was nice, he would have cat adventures then come back to nap on one of the benches on the back patio or some giant slice of a tree. If he wanted to come inside and no one noticed him, he’d crawl up the screen door (which irritated Scott endlessly) – was very noticeable!
He started having seizures three weeks ago. Trips to the emergency vet, medicine and more medicine. I thought the medicine was working since he had three seizure free days. He was snoozy from the drugs, and spent a lot of time being held while he slept. Petted, brushed, and loved. Comforted after each seizure. He knew how much we loved him, and he was with his people until the end.
May Starclan light your path. May you find swift running, good hunting, and shelter where you sleep.
As I work through automating certificate installation, most applications have a “service account” user that has write access to the SSL certificate files. However, that user does not generally have permission to restart the application service.
We could get the ID added to sudoers with specific rights to manage the service … but it seemed more straightforward to use Polkit for very granular control permitting the service account to run specific verbs with systemctl.
The following rule allows the “tomcatadmin” user to run systemctl start, stop, or restart with the apache-tomcat.service unit.
cat > /etc/polkit-1/rules.d/60-apache-tomcat-tomcatadmin.rules <<'EOF'
polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
if (action.id == "org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units") {
var unit = action.lookup("unit");
var verb = action.lookup("verb");
if (subject.user == "tomcatadmin" &&
unit == "apache-tomcat.service" &&
(verb == "start" || verb == "stop" || verb == "restart")) {
return polkit.Result.YES;
}
}
});
EOF
Somewhat disparagingly, I’ve often thought the payment card companies came up with the PCI standards as an effort to avoid a legislative solution. Significant, public issues made people “demand answers” – and government regulation is an obvious answer. Except it’s outside of your control. If you can convince everyone that you’ve come up with rules to solve the problem … no need for those government types to waste their time and create more red tape! We’re all good here.
I thought of that when reading about the soldier arrested for using insider knowledge in Polymarket trades. “Insider trading has no place on Polymarket,” the company wrote. “Today’s arrest is proof the system works.” … an unregulated market were people see spikes in “trades” that appear to be driven on insider knowledge is bad for business. If you want to go and bet on which team ends up in the basketball championship, you aren’t betting against people with special knowledge that put you at a disadvantage. But bets like this? Who wants to put their money on “US invades Iran in 7 days” against someone sitting in the situation room delaying the troops movement because his bet was exactly 9:57PM UTC today.
Of course dude wants to show “the system works” — last thing he wants is to fall under securities regulations!
With recent Windows updates, users now get a big message saying “Caution: Unknown remote connection” when launching RDP sessions from our CyberArk server. Easy enough – I have an internal CA, I can generate a code signing certificate, so I can sign these RDP files.
Except, in testing, I continually got an error indicating rdpsign cannot find the certificate. It’s there. I have a private key. It’s a code signing certificate. An hour or so later, I realize the “sha256” value is actually the SHA-1 thumbprint. Which … not my first guess and really more of a “out of reasonable options, start trying silly things” guess.
“$env:SystemRoot\System32\rdpsign.exe” /v /sha256 $hash256 $rdp
Voila, “All rdp file(s) have been successfully signed.”
Sigh — and, after all this work? I go from the red “unknown publisher” error to a yellow “yeah, you should think about this” banner.
We were having a lot of trouble using the measure tool in Blender — after discovering that you can hold the Ctrl key and “snap” your selection to a vertex, it actually worked in the way we wanted it to. But, before that discovery, my thought was to manually select two vertices and use a Python script to measure the distance between those points. That is “blender units” … and the metric or imperial units would be more meaningful. So I converted based on the scene configuration.
import bpy
import bmesh
def format_metric(meters: float) -> str:
a = abs(meters)
if a >= 1.0:
return f"{meters:.6f} m"
elif a >= 0.01:
return f"{meters * 100.0:.3f} cm"
else:
return f"{meters * 1000.0:.3f} mm"
def format_imperial(meters: float) -> str:
total_inches = meters / 0.0254
sign = "-" if total_inches < 0 else ""
total_inches = abs(total_inches)
feet = int(total_inches // 12)
inches = total_inches - (feet * 12)
if feet > 0:
return f"{sign}{feet} ft {inches:.3f} in"
else:
return f"{sign}{total_inches:.3f} in"
def measure_selected_vertices():
ctx = bpy.context
obj = ctx.edit_object
if obj is None or obj.type != 'MESH':
raise RuntimeError("Go into Edit Mode on a mesh and select exactly 2 vertices.")
bm = bmesh.from_edit_mesh(obj.data)
selected_verts = [v for v in bm.verts if v.select]
if len(selected_verts) != 2:
raise RuntimeError(f"Expected exactly 2 selected vertices, found {len(selected_verts)}.")
v1, v2 = selected_verts
# Convert local vertex coordinates to world-space coordinates
p1 = obj.matrix_world @ v1.co
p2 = obj.matrix_world @ v2.co
# Raw world-space distance in Blender units
raw_distance = (p2 - p1).length
scene = ctx.scene
units = scene.unit_settings
scale_length = units.scale_length if units.scale_length != 0 else 1.0
# Convert Blender units to meters according to the scene unit scale
distance_meters = raw_distance * scale_length
print("\n----- Vertex Distance -----")
print(f"Object: {obj.name}")
print(f"Raw distance (Blender units): {raw_distance:.6f}")
print(f"Scene unit system: {units.system}")
print(f"Scene unit scale: {scale_length}")
if units.system == 'METRIC':
print(f"Formatted distance: {format_metric(distance_meters)}")
elif units.system == 'IMPERIAL':
print(f"Formatted distance: {format_imperial(distance_meters)}")
else:
print("Formatted distance: Scene unit system is 'NONE'")
print(f"Interpreted using current unit scale: {format_metric(distance_meters)}")
measure_selected_vertices()
A quick PowerShell script to report on its own signature data:
$scriptPath = $PSCommandPath
if (-not $scriptPath) {
throw 'This script must be run from a .ps1 file so $PSCommandPath is available.'
}
$sig = Get-AuthenticodeSignature -FilePath $scriptPath
Write-Host "Script path: $scriptPath`n" -ForegroundColor Cyan
[PSCustomObject]@{
Status = $sig.Status
StatusMessage = $sig.StatusMessage
SignatureType = $sig.SignatureType
IsOSBinary = $sig.IsOSBinary
SignerSubject = $sig.SignerCertificate.Subject
SignerThumbprint = $sig.SignerCertificate.Thumbprint
SignerNotBefore = $sig.SignerCertificate.NotBefore
SignerNotAfter = $sig.SignerCertificate.NotAfter
TimeStamperSubject = $sig.TimeStamperCertificate.Subject
TimeStamperThumbprint = $sig.TimeStamperCertificate.Thumbprint
} | Format-List
To sign the script:
$thumb = '87E4C1F40D1DB8486F1E9093A76626AB1DFDEA30'
$scriptPath = "$env:USERPROFILE\git\CyberSecurity\misc\CheckPSSignature.ps1"
$cert = Get-ChildItem Cert:\CurrentUser\My, Cert:\LocalMachine\My |
Where-Object {
$_.Thumbprint -eq $thumb -and
$_.HasPrivateKey -and
($_.EnhancedKeyUsageList | Where-Object {
$_.ObjectId -eq '1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.3' -or $_.FriendlyName -eq 'Code Signing'
})
} |
Select-Object -First 1
if (-not $cert) {
throw "Code signing certificate $thumb not found."
}
Set-AuthenticodeSignature -FilePath $scriptPath -Certificate $cert
Get-AuthenticodeSignature -FilePath $scriptPath | Format-List *
And now the script is signed:
Add a new Entra App registration for Venafi
There is no redirect URI needed for this registration
In this example, my App ID is 05151153-f5d5-4ce8-94cb-9086d70d3c05
On app, go to certificates & secrets. Upload PUBLIC key of a Digital Signature certificate.
Confirm the public key has been added
In the Azure Portal, navigate to the Key Vaults
Confirm you have an appropriate key vault, or create one. In this example, I am creating a new key vault.
Select the subscription and resource group to be used, provide a name for the vault.
In this example, my key vault is LJRVenafiTestKeyVault
This vault uses RBAC access. Click on “Access control (IAM)” to add rights for the Entra app to use this key vault
Select “Add role assignment”
Select the “Key Vault Certificates Officer” role
Add the application name to this role:
Now, in Venafi, we can add an Azure Key Vault installation to a certificate.
First, we need to create a new certificate type credential to hold the private key for the certificate used in the app registration
Upload the certificate pfx file and supply the pfx password
Navigate to the certificate you want published into the Azure Key Vault. From the “Actions” menu, select “Add Installation”
Select “Track, validate, and automate installation of this certificate”
Select a device and chose the “Azure Key Vault” installation type:
The first half of the form does not need to be changed, although you can add a description explaining what the deployment is.
Select the device credential for the host. The “Application ID” is the Azure App ID from the registered application. The Certificate Credential is the Digital Signature private key uploaded for application authentication.
The Azure Key Vault Name is the name of the key vault created in Azure, and Certificate Name is the “friendly” name to be used in the certificate file deployed to the server. This often needs to be included in the application configuration (use this keystore file and use this certificate from the keystore). Because I am using this key in a release pipeline, I do not want to bind the certificate to a web service
The cert will be queued for installation into the Azure Key Vault
Once the installation has completed, return to the Azure Portal to confirm that the certificate is now present in the key vault.
This document assumes:
Azure CLI is installed (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli-linux)
You already have an agent pool with online agent in a deployment pool
And, finally, that you have a pipeline deployment that uses a static keystore. We will be replacing that static keystore file with one obtained from the Azure Key Vault.
First, ensure the Azure DevOps service connection used by the pipeline has access to LJRVenafiTestKeyVault with at least:
From the Azure command line, e.g.
az role assignment create –assignee-object-id 107d2d9a-4d1b-4d8b-9cd6-0f95587eb9ae –assignee-principal-type ServicePrincipal –role “Key Vault Secrets User” –scope “/subscriptions/dede429d-a340-4e90-8f76-05aa5280a1f5/resourceGroups/ljr-keyvault-demo/providers/Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults/LJRVenafiTestKeyVault”
If you do not know which service connection is being used, update and run the pipeline. It will fail with a permission error, but the service connection’s usage history will reflect the release pipeline’s use:
Update your pipeline to retrieve the certificate from the Azure KeyVault. Add an Azure CLI task using an inline script
set -euo pipefail
PFX_FILE=”$AGENT_TEMPDIRECTORY/VenafiDeployedCertificate.pfx”
az keyvault secret download \
–vault-name LJRVenafiTestKeyVault \
–name VenafiDeployedCertificate \
–file “$PFX_FILE” \
–encoding base64
echo “Downloaded PFX to $PFX_FILE”
echo “##vso[task.setvariable variable=PFX_PATH]$PFX_FILE”
If you need a JKS file, add an additional bash task with an inline script
set -euo pipefail
JKS_FILE=”$AGENT_TEMPDIRECTORY/VenafiDeployedCertificate.jks”
# Verify keytool exists
command -v keytool >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo “keytool not found on agent”; exit 1; }
keytool -importkeystore \
-srckeystore “$(PFX_PATH)” \
-srcstoretype PKCS12 \
-srcstorepass “” \
-destkeystore “$JKS_FILE” \
-deststoretype JKS \
-deststorepass “$(JksPassword)” \
-destkeypass “$(JksPassword)” \
-noprompt
echo “Created JKS at $JKS_FILE”
echo “##vso[task.setvariable variable=JKS_PATH]$JKS_FILE”
Add a pipeline variable for the JKS Password – make sure to click the lock icon to protect the password
And, finally, add a bash task task to copy the JKS or PFX file to the proper place on the server
set -euo pipefail
# Copy JKS to location on server used in app config
TARGET_DIR=”/opt/credential-injection/certs”
TARGET_JKS=”$TARGET_DIR/VenafiDeployedCertificate.jks”
cp “$(JKS_PATH)” “$TARGET_JKS”
chmod 600 “$TARGET_JKS”
echo “JKS copied to $TARGET_JKS”
# Or copy pfx to location on server used in app config
TARGET_PFX=”$TARGET_DIR/VenafiDeployedCertificate.pfx”
cp “$(PFX_PATH)” “$TARGET_PFX”
chmod 600 “$TARGET_PFX”
Create a release to run the pipeline. Looking at the logs, you should see a confirmation that the pfx file was created
And, if you are creating a JKS file, a confirmation that it was created as well
You should also see the certificate file(s) on the server:
When a certificate is requested from Venafi against the stand-alone Microsoft CA, ADCS successfully issues the certificate, but the certificate is immediately revoked with revocation reason:
This is happening to the same certificate that was just issued, not a prior cert.
Venafi should submit the CSR, obtain the issued certificate, and leave the newly issued certificate valid.
Venafi submits the CSR, ADCS issues the certificate successfully, and then the same certificate is immediately revoked as Superseded.
1. ADCS database confirms issued cert is the same cert being revoked
Example request:
This proves Venafi is revoking the cert it just obtained.
2. ADCS request contents are valid
For the same request, ADCS shows the CSR and issued certificate are normal and match expectations.
Request attributes
CSR / issued cert contents
This suggests the CA is not returning malformed or obviously incorrect cert content.
3. Security event log confirms immediate issue then revoke
After enabling Certification Services auditing, Security log shows this sequence:
Event 4886
Event 4887
Event 4870
This happens effectively immediately.
4. Pattern is repeatable
Querying the CA database for requests from HOSTNAME\venafi shows a repeated pattern where most requests are immediately revoked with:
The exceptions were tests where revoke capability had been intentionally removed from the Venafi CA account.
5. Permission test changed behavior but did not fix root cause
When Issue and Manage Certificates was removed from the Venafi CA account, the request no longer completed the revoke path and instead failed earlier with:
This indicates Venafi is performing CA administrative operations after CSR submission, and revocation happens later in that same general post-issuance path.
6. Procmon on the Venafi host shows VPlatform.exe using both CertRequest and CertAdmin
Procmon on CWWAPP1989D captured VPlatform.exe doing the following:
Cert enrollment path
VPlatform.exe queries and activates:
CA admin path
VPlatform.exe then queries and activates:
DCOM/RPC communication
Procmon also shows:
This strongly suggests:
Given the ADCS security logs, that admin path appears to be what revokes the newly issued cert.
Additional observations
Stand-alone CA
This is a stand-alone Microsoft CA, not enterprise template-based ADCS.
No special Venafi workflow/customization
This is a dev system with:
That makes this look less like an environmental customization problem and more like:
Failed auth events also observed
We saw Security log 4625 failures from HOSTNAME for DOMAIN\USER
From the Security log:
Since time resolution in the log is seconds, it is possible Venafi is requesting the cert under the configured credential (HOSTNAME\venafi), attempting to do something else under DOMAIN\venafisystemuser, getting an auth failure, and then revoking the certificate under the configured credential (DOMAIN\venafisystemuser). I would be surprised if this is the case because “superseded” is a very specific revocation reason. I would expect something like a generic “Unspecified” or “Cessation of Operation” to be used.
Summary conclusion
Current evidence indicates that:
At this point, this appears to be:
Resolution
The issue was resolved by changing the policy module settings to set the cert request to pending instead of automatically issue. While I expected this to leave the cert in a pending state and require manual intervention (or a batch job to bulk approve whatever is pending), the cert was immediately issued.
The buzzards used to hang out in this old, dead tree across the street; and, after the rain, they would spread their wings and dry out. The tree fell a while ago; but, now that our roof is stable … we’ve got buzzards airing out their wings on the roof.
