I periodically review Azure PaaS resource edge security. As a part of that process I examine and cleanup AzureSQL firewall rules. Once you have more than a handful of subscriptions and AzureSQL databases, doing this manually starts becoming unfeasible. To that end, Azure Powershell is your friend… As is typical, you need to install the […]
I work on Azure Tenants that utilize multiple subscriptions in their design. I wanted to centralize my Azure Automation work and use a single Automation account. By default, I found that powershell scripts I fired off from Azure Automation work within the subscription that the Automation account was created within. But business requirements necessitate multiple […]
Continuing on my journey up the Azure Automation mountain, I recently completed a simple AZ PowerShell script that takes several input parameters and scales UP or scales DOWN a given AzureSQL database instance depending on what time of day it is. Before I go any further, if you are just getting started in Azure Automation, […]
I have been using Powershell to manage pieces of Azure on and off for about a year and half now. I had heard tell of Azure Automation but never really had a good reason to justify spending the time climbing that particular mountain (hill really…). Then the request came through… let’s scale AzureSQL databases up […]
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 […]
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 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 have been working on email stuff on and off for the last… forever. One of the very handy and easy to use tools to have in one’s pocket for testing email functionality with a particular SMTP server is the ability to quickly send email through a selected server from the command line. Just like […]
This is a quick snippet for all of you working with RDS in Server 2012+… and bemoaning the fact that Microsoft took something relatively simple and made it horribly convoluted… In Powershell you can manually set a Session Host Server to use a specific licensing server and mode. To do so you run the following […]
I work with a lot of IIS servers. Keeping track of what sites are present on which servers can sometimes be a daunting task. Heretofore I have been dealing with the rather obnoxious and time consuming process of checking sites and bindings by looking at each one in the IIS console. The other day I […]
I found myself creating security groups for different servers in one of my domains over and over again and using the GUI can get a bit tedious. So I decided to write a quick powershell script that provides an interactive prompt asking for the server name, group type (select from options) and then from there […]
To make this comparison we need to first consider the problem that both approaches help us to solve. When programming any system you are essentially dealing with data and the code that changes that data. These two fundamental aspects of programming are handled quite differently in procedural systems compared with object oriented systems, and these […]