Welcome 2020ne – “are we there yet?”
“are we there yet?…. are we there yet?….” In vacations past, this was the back seat cry heard by many young parents as they sought the refuge of a far-away campsite or holiday house in search of some peace and quiet after a hectic and busy year. Clearly, 2020 was no normal year and it […]
Disable-CsAdForest – “Cannot remove the Active Directory settings for the domain due to ‘FE’ still being activated”
I’ve spent 15 years deploying on-premises versions of Microsoft Unified Communications, namely OCS, Lync & Skype for Business. During that period I did a lot of installations, but never had I done a full removal of the product. I guess that speaks to the usability of Microsoft Voice solutions. Once your in, the years just […]
Understanding Undocumented ARM Oddities
Over the past year I’ve been working pretty heavily with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to create safe, reusable and consistent deployments of virtual infrastructure. When producing ARM templates, it’s important to understand what resource types are available, and what values to use in your template. I always use the Azure Template Reference to understand […]
Undocumented ARM Oddities – .Net Core App Services
Every once in a while, when working with ARM templates you come across something that is missing from the official Microsoft ARM template reference. In my case yesterday, I was looking to update the configuration of an Azure App Service to use the DotNetCore stack (rather than .NET 4.8). While I initially thought this would […]
Azure Bastion – Unable to query Bastion data.
I’ve recently setup Azure Bastion to give external users/vendors access to resources via RDP or SSH following these instructions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bastion/tutorial-create-host-portal The key permissions outlined in the prerequisites at point 3 are: A virtual network. A Windows virtual machine in the virtual network. The following required roles: Reader role on the virtual machine. Reader role on […]
Get all restore points for an Azure VM
Getting restore points out of Azure can be like getting blood from a stone. The portal likes to always set a custom filter showing only ~90 days and your Powershell cmdlet only allows for a 30 day interval for retrieval dates. When running ‘Get-AzRecoveryServicesBackupRecoveryPoint’ you get the following: Sigh.. I just want all my restore […]
Azure Application Insights – No Client Source IP Address
Working with one of your customers this week who is implementing Azure API Management alongside their web applications. We are funnelling all the request logs into an Application Insights services to manage visibility of the end-to-end transaction data. We noticed that all the client GET requests had ‘0.0.0.0’ in Client IP Address. Request Properties Value […]
Upgrading Megaport Cloud Routers
Recently I had the pleasure of upgrade a Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) from version 1 to the new version 2. Version 2 MCR sits on a whole new code base and a side by side migration is required. In this blog I’ll show you how we went about the process, this could also be used […]
Assign Teams phone numbers using Microsoft Forms, Logic Apps and Azure Automation
Sometimes provisioning users into Office 365 services requires custom settings to be executed with PowerShell. This can present a problem when the teams responsible for managing the ongoing process have varying levels of understanding. How do you provide a front end user interface for my custom code without the need for the operators to need […]
Tips for purchasing your next Teams video solution
Here are some notes on selecting Teams Room’s based on physical features. These help enable a positive experience when using Microsoft Teams Room’s