Does Disabling User/Computer GPO Settings Make Processing Quicker? | Ask Premier Field Engineering (PFE) Platforms — Read on blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askpfeplat/2018/10/22/does-disabling-user-computer-gpo-settings-make-processing-quicker/

The other day I noticed that my commits were not being shown on my commit history on Github. I have a new laptop with a fresh install Git for Windows so I figured it was something to do with that, and it was!! What I had forgotten to do was set my commit email address in Git, I’d obviously done it on my old laptop and forgotten I’d ever done so.

Last July, Microsoft Learning announced some upcoming changes to the Microsoft Azure Certifications to make them more role-based. Recently, surrounding the Microsoft Ignite 2018 conference, they announced and released further information about these changes to transform the Azure certification tracks. This news includes more than just announcement of new Azure certification exams, but also the… via Introducing Role-based Microsoft & Azure Certification Shakeup — Build Azure

We have a hub and spoke design in Azure for our vNets and needed to peer the vNets together. This can be done in an ARM template and we could have deployed all three networks in one go and peered them as part of the ARM template deployment. For various reasons that approach didn’t really work for us, 1 reason was the customer is very sensitive to change control and having all 3 vNets being controlled by one ARM deployment didn’t sit very well with them and made them nervous.

What is Azure Firewall - A fully stateful firewall as a service. Before you can deploy Azure Firewall you need to register the provider in your subscription : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/public-preview Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowRegionalGatewayManagerForSecureGateway -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Network Register-AzureRmProviderFeature -FeatureName AllowAzureFirewall -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.Network It can take up to 30 minutes for the feature registration to complete The easy way to get going and play with Azure Firewall is to use the quickstart template https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/101-azurefirewall-sandbox

This ARM template will deploy x number of virtual machines (takes the number you need as a parameter), a storage account in the target resource group for boot diagnostics, deploys the VMs in an availability group and deploys x number of data disks per VM. Both the number of data disks (per VM) and size are parameters. It attaches the VMs to an existing vnet/subnet, both of which are parameters. it also sets the Locale to UK on Windows servers using a custom script extension as per https://www.

An ARM template to deploy a basic OMS workspace in Azure. It deploys a workspace and two OMS solutions: Anti-Malware assessment and Updates. Another template for OMS deployment, which is identical to the above, but links the workspace to an existing automation account. Note it does not create the automation account, the automation account must already exist. These templates are over on my Github page

Had a request to throw something together to query multiple machines and find the smarthost server that IIS was configured to use. All I had time for was ‘quick and dirty’ so this is what I came up with; get-adcomputer -filter * | Select-Object dnshostname >c:\servers.txt Get-WmiObject -Namespace “root\MicrosoftIISv2” -Class “IISSMTPServerSetting” -Filter “Name =‘SmtpSvc/1’” -comp (Get-Content c:\servers.txt) | Select-Object smarthost,defaultdomain | export-csv c:\servers.csv -NoTypeInformation Obvious problem with the above is there is no connectivity check in place so any servers not being enabled for PS Remoting or firewalls in the way will just generate an error

We have a hybrid Exchange setup with Exchange online. On premises is Exchange 2016. Users who had been migrated to Exchange online could only see availability of other users and resources that were still on premises. A check of the organization relationship showed the following; Run the below powershell on your on premises servers and look for the FreeBusyAccessLevel setting Get-OrganizationRelationship | fl FreeBusyAccessLevel : AvailabilityOnly This was why migrated users could only see availabilty of on premises users and not any more detail.

A single user in AD was not being synced to Azure AD via AAD Connect. All other users were syncing just fine. When looking at the account the attribute msExchRecipientTypeDetails was set to 2, which indicates a linked mailbox. We used to use linked mailboxes but stopped doing so quite some time ago. Obviously this account got missed after we migrated all users into a single forest. To fix set-user -identity “useralias” -linkedmasteraccount $null