I recently ran into a frustrating issue where I setup a new subscription in Azure and when I went to manage with Powershell I couldn’t see on the list that gets output from the following command: Get-AzSubscription

In my line of work we often evaluate new ways to do things, specifically new platforms for server hosting, disaster recovery, backups, etc. One of the requests that often comes from vendors is “How big is your environment?” Microsoft has the rather excellent “MAP” tool however I find it to be a bit slow, somewhat […]

A colleague of mine recently solved one of the biggest pain points I have dealt with regarding Office365 – that is, Microsoft’s seemingly hit-or-miss modern authentication. Symptoms look like this: 1. Outlook client can’t connect and/or authenticate for end-users 2. Turning on Azure MFA for an end-user ruins their life (and yours) because all office […]

Got into the office this morning and immediately started the scramble because of reports from several users that Microsoft Office365 TEAMS was not working (a key communication app for us and many other businesses). Microsoft officially had no outages reported when I looked ~8:50 AM EST. So I think this is very fresh. Teams is […]

FIRST – I am stealing code here and re-sharing (with very little modification). All credit goes the fine gentleman that wrote these two articles, I would urge you to read them: Bulk Add IP Access Restrictions to Azure App Service Using AZ Powershell Bulk Add Cloudflares IPs to Azure App Service Access Restrictions Using AZ […]

I won’t go into great detail here but in short, if VSSAdmin is not letting you delete shadow copies and is throwing this message: Error: Snapshots were found, but they were outside of your allowed context.  Try removing them with the backup application which created them. There is another (less safe…) program called DiskShadow which […]

After working with RDS (Remote Desktop Services, previously known as “Terminal Services”, also referred to “The biggest pain in the rear and the only way to get more than two remote desktop sessions on a server because Microsoft either hates admins, hates this product, or both”) I have come to the conclusion that Microsoft really […]

Several years ago Microsoft provided Windows 7 operating system ISO file downloads easily through a site called Digital River. Legitimate, clean copies of all versions of Windows 7. Then they stopped. Why is this a problem? I refurbish a lot of older desktops and laptops; often to give them away. Those systems usually have a […]

If you got a new computer system recently then it probably is using UEFI bios and it didn’t come with Windows installation media or a product license activation key. What gives? Manufacturers are now embedding the activation key in the UEFI BIOS. You can retrieve the key by running this command from within a Windows […]

This will (hopefully) be brief… Here is the Scenario: You have deployed Office365 You have an on-prem Domain Controller (hopefully more than one!) You are using Azure AD Connect 1.1 or greater, (which is installed on one of your domain controllers) You create or manage user accounts using your on-prem domain controllers Whenever you create […]

I had a recent requirement from one of our clients that took a little bit of tinkering to figure out… we will call our client Contoso LLC. and our project that we host for them we will call the “Cool Widget Project.” We built a really neat widget of an application for Contoso to use […]

I was recently introduced to Office 2016 and along with it Outlook 2016. I am techy, I like new stuff, I embrace change… this isn’t about me just being stuck in my ways. In short, the thematic approach that Microsoft has taken in its 2016 office products is what I call “ocular assault.” Did they […]

I regularly use the Microsoft Windows sysprep tool to create template Windows Server 2012 R2 systems for wider deploy using cloning. Sysprep is used to modify a pre-configured Windows system and create an image or “template” so that you can create unique copies of it for faster system deployment. Failure to use syprep before cloning […]

I am going to get right to it today. I really don’t like Microsoft Exchange. I think it is a bloated, convoluted, over-priced product. Welcome to being a Microsoft admin :). I was recently tasked with doing a bit of investigative work on an Exchange server and determining what all was using the box for […]

I will keep this short and sweet. We have servers in our environment that have multiple IP addresses assigned to a single NIC. That’s normally just fine. However on occasion I will have very strange issues occur where essentially all networking appears to be working and yet web browsing won’t work. I can ping my […]