Office365 – Sync with On-Premise Domain Controller – Force a Sync so You Don’t have to Sit on your Hands

nbeam published 2 years ago in Azure, Domain Administration, Microsoft, Office365, Powershell. Tags: , ,

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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 a new user or make a change in AD you have to wait around (up to 30 minutes) for Office365 to reflect the change

In previous version of AAD Connect there was a Windows Scheduled task that would periodically sync AD data to Office365.

In later/latest versions of the tool there is now a scheduling engine that is part of the tool which is set to do a “delta” sync (only updates/changes) every 30 minutes.

When you are working though you might not want to wait around 30 minutes.
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Exchange Powershell Kung-Fu – Tracking Email and Mailboxes

nbeam published 3 years ago in Exchange, Microsoft, Powershell, Windows Administration. Tags: , , , ,

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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 mail services. To that end, I needed to answer two questions…

What mailboxes are currently in use?
What is currently using this machine as an SMTP server to send mail out?

Below I am going to provide the powershell commands I had to figure out which helped me answer those questions. (more…)

Brief Snippet – How to Send Emails from the Powershell Command Line

nbeam published 4 years ago in Microsoft, Powershell. Tags: ,

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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 using telnet to test ports makes day-to-day IT life easier vs. having to grab and install some extra tool, so also does the ability to shoot emails off from a CLI.
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Manually Set the RDS Target Licensing Server for an RDS Session Host in Powershell

nbeam published 4 years ago in Microsoft, Powershell, Server 2012R2, Windows Administration. Tags: , , ,

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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 on the session host server.

$obj = gwmi -namespace "Root/CIMV2/TerminalServices" Win32_TerminalServiceSetting
$obj.SetSpecifiedLicenseServerList("servername.contoso.local")

$obj = gwmi -namespace "Root/CIMV2/TerminalServices" Win32_TerminalServiceSetting
$obj.ChangeMode(VALUE)

First two commands specify the licensing server you want. Hence change servername.contoso.local to your environment. That’s only the first half though. You then need to set the licensing mode and that is what the second two commands do. Where it says VALUE you can enter in either a “2” or a “4” depending on the type of licensing you have.

2 = Per Device
4 = Per User

Hope this saves someone else some headache… I think the MS approved way to do this is probably to use group policy but this is a quick and dirty method if you just need to get a machine working quickly.

Powershell Snippet for getting all Sites hosted on an IIS Server in a CSV File

nbeam published 4 years ago in IIS, Microsoft, Powershell, Web Administration. Tags: , ,

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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 thought to myself, surely there must be a more effecient way to do this from the CLI via PowerShell… There is… I quickly found the following code on Stack Overflow after a Google search: (more…)