It should be no secret that I'm a big fan of the Veeam Hardened Repository. While I never spent much time deploying the VHR from scratch, the VHR ISO in particular has interested me due to the ease of deployment, and with Veeam's dedication to making this a turn-key solution, it's hard to justify using a repository in most cases that doesn't have immutability from the start. As Veeam released VBR v13 a few weeks/month…
I'm happy to report that Veeam has a new KB for any of those that are deploying the Veeam Hardened Repository v.2.0, Veeam Software Appliance or Veeam JeOS appliances from USB thumb-drive. I've notice this particular issue recently reported on Reddit and elsewhere where users are experiencing the error "An unknown error has occurred" when trying to deploy the appliance. I even experienced this exact issue when I was attempting to deploy the VHR v2.0…
Several months ago I came across an old Barracuda 290 backup appliance from a former client that was no longer in use. These old appliances don't generally have a lot of power, but I like to repurpose things for the lab or for experimentation when I can. For instance, I've previously repurposed a Datta ALTO 3 appliance as a Windows 11 workstation that works great as a jump-box to straddle my production and lab environments…
When you reference the Veeam Hardened Repository ISO, you'll note that the word "hardened" is in there. What makes the VHR "hardened"? I've touched on this before, but Veeam makes use of STIG's to harden the OS to the DISA recommendations. One of those functions used to harden the OS is USBGuard. And what is USBGuard? It's a service used to define a list of authorized USB devices that can connect to a machine. In…