Tag: commandline

Recovering from a BitLocker System Lockout after a BIOS Update

by Samuel Mitchell, posted in Microsoft, Security, windows

We had a user who was not abiding by the rules to store all the company data on the network drives to ensure it is protected and backed up by our systems.

The user’s laptop got a BIOS upgrade and unfortunately the laptop was rebooting requesting Bitlocker password. In our environment, Bitlocker passwords are registered in Active Directory upon activation but for some reason unknown to us, it was not there for this particular laptop.

Our colleague at the site, research a way to overcome this challenge and found the following solution:

  1. Download an Application that will allow you to build a bootable USB drive in DOS 32-bit. E.g. RUFUS
  2. Execute your selected application to build bootable USB drive (You might have to first format USB drive at 32-bit).
  3. Download all BIOS updates for the computer model from the vendor support site. (If you remember the previously installed BIOS version, you can download that version from the site)
  4. Boot up the computer with the bootable USB drive and run each BIOS from the command prompt (At this point, you are trying to find the BIOS version before the update was done, if you already know the version just install it).
  5. After updating the BIOS, reboot the computer to verify if Windows boots up successfully.
  6. If unsuccessful, go back to Step 4 and execute the next BIOS version file.
  1.  

    NOTE: Execute your BIOS from the latest to the oldest.

Configuring AWS CLI using Python and pip on Windows

by Samuel Mitchell, posted in AWS, Uncategorized, windows

This article was created to document the steps to configure and utilize the AWS CLI on a Windows machine.

There are multiple ways of installing the AWS CLI but I choose the method of using the Python with pip3 since I already have the tool install on my Windows 10 machine.

  1. After you install the python on your windows system from python.org

2.  You will run the following command to ensure it is working from the command prompt

python –version

3. You will then use the python utility pip3 and check if it is installed using the following command:

pip3 –version

4. Once the version is displayed without any errors, you can proceed to installing the AWS CLI using pip3. You will do this by using the command below:

pip3 install awscli

5. After the installation is complete. proceed to test that the AWS CLI is working:

where aws

Once the folder path of the AWS CLI is shown, then you have successfully installed the CLI.

Now the next step is to configure it for use with your AWS service. This can be done by running the following aws command:

aws configure

It will prompt you for the AWS Access key ID, Secret Access Key,  default Region and default output format. This allows you to connect to the AWS without authenticating each time. I would recommend that you setup an IAM user account to authenticate with the AWS CLI and limit the access to only the features that will be accessed using this method.

For further details, please consult the AWS CLI documentation here.