Infrastructure Management
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
I’m going to continue my recent look at securing your Office 365/Azure AD directory with a quick dive into using Conditional Access rules to protect your directory’s most prized asset - accounts with admin roles.
These are roles that can be used to accomplish admin tasks within your organisation’s Office 365/Azure AD and Azure estate and they are important because they are essentially the keys to the kingdom. While you should be looking to secure all your accounts because all your users probably have access to sensitive information, systems or services; admin accounts are the accounts that give their user access to your entire estate in one or two leaps.
Continue reading →
Friday, July 3, 2020
I suspect most of you reading this article will already know this, but part of Microsoft’s Azure AD (AAD) / Office 365 Cloud directory service that you get when you pay for premium AAD is Conditional Access (CA), which can be used to allow quite sophisticated access controls for accessing Office 365 resources.
Of course, you get basic Office 365 MFA with the basic Office 365 enterprise product, and you should absolutely look into enrolling your users and turning this on straight away if that is what you have.
Continue reading →
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Introduction to Microsoft Mobile Device Management I'm currently settling in to a new job where I'm spending a fair amount of time working with Microsoft's Mobile security management tools, mostly Microsoft Intune. This is largely what I was doing towards the end of my old job too, and while there's some great people writing great material out there, I think there's a lack of articles that try to start at the beginning with current (as of April 2019) tools and pull all the strands together, so that's what we're going to talk about here.
Continue reading →
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Introduction So I think a lot of us take backups for granted. It's one of those things you look at once and then tend to not worry about too much. As long as its working, why worry? Except… if you don’t look at it, how do you know how well its working? I’m talking from the viewpoint of a senior engineer or manager here of course, hopefully if you’re a junior engineer who has been put in charge of backups you’re making sure that the current system works well and telling people about any concerns you might have.
Continue reading →
Thursday, August 23, 2018
IntroductionOne of the new features in Windows 10 1803 is the ability for "local Active Directory" Domain joined workstations to allow users to reset their password from the login screen. This was introduced for Azure Active Directory joined systems in Windows 10 1709. In this post I’m quickly going to run through what you need to do in order to configure this for your domain. I’m making the following assumptions:
Continue reading →
Tuesday, August 8, 2017
One of the things I’m working on at the moment is moving the remainder of our Exchange organisation over to Office 365 / Exchange Online.
We moved the bulk of our accounts some time ago; students here have been on Office 365 Exchange email for a few years, but staff and ‘role’ email accounts have been held on local Exchange servers until this month.
The things I’ve seen people worry about on these migrations have actually been the least of my worries.
Continue reading →
Sunday, June 11, 2017
So I recently did a podcast with SonicWall on Safeguarding and the statutory guidance on Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSiE). You can listen to it here.
Invaluable resources:
Safer Internet Centre's Advice section. Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) Thinkuknow website.
Continue reading →
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
As I’m sure most of us know by now, SHA1 cryptography hashes have been increasingly under attack, and are now regarded as fully broken. In fact, my use of “now” kinda understates the point; you should be urgently looking to upgrade to SHA2 if you have any devices or servers using certificates.
If you’re not aware of these risks then please look around. There are some good introductory articles on the entrust website that talk about this issue, but please note that these articles are from 2014 and somewhat understand the urgency of the issue.
Continue reading →
Sunday, October 2, 2016
{There was a section here on converting Windows 2016 server eval to full version for enterprise customers, but as Windows 2016 is properly out there now it seems pointless. I've pasted what was here into the comments below in case anyone needs it} Upgrading ADFS The first question after deciding to roll out a new version of Windows server into your organisation is what to deploy first, and the answer for me, at least, turned out to be ADFS 4.
Continue reading →
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Wireless is already ubiquitous in any modern home or business these days, yet it’s one of the areas that probably most upsets employees, managers and IT staff all alike. There’s an assumption that business WiFi must be easy because anyone can purchase a cheap home wireless router and set it up at home, so how hard can it be to do the same thing for a business?
Actually for a small business where you’re just providing connectivity for one or two people with their work laptops and maybe a mobile phone or two in a small office, it’s probably not too difficult at all.
Continue reading →
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
This is perhaps another example of my recent comment about SCVMM making harder work of things than perhaps it should, but for all that I want to also say that it’s very likely that the root cause of this error was a mistake on our part. I also want to share this in case someone else has a similar problem.
On one of our clusters, I noticed that one or two guests were failing to migrate to a particular host.
Continue reading →
Monday, August 26, 2013
We’ve always been a VMWare shop.
As some of you might know, I’ve been involved in the Microsoft virtualisation stack in the past, writing guides for Virtual PC and bits and pieces for the server products, but on the server side of things, at least, VMWare have always had the lead. They’ve had the advantage of beating Microsoft (and others, but this article isn’t about those) to market and the advantage of being able to concentrate on virtualisation because it’s all they do.
Continue reading →
Friday, May 3, 2013
I see lots of people talking about and asking about hardware being “prepared for BYOD” and/or “BYOD ready”. Most of the time they’re talking about Wireless Access Points(WAPs) or other similar items of infrastructure.
In a lot of ways, as long as you stick to a reputable vendor, what make of WAP you buy is the least difficult and least interesting part of the project - you wouldn’t focus too heavily on what brand of switch your desktops were wired into as part of a project to give everyone access to a new corporate intranet site from the desktop - you’d spend more time checking that the site’s CMS system worked with your standard browser and thinking about what content users should be able to get to, and how they’d get to it.
Continue reading →
Thursday, March 14, 2013
We are almost exclusively a user of HP Procurve switches where I work. We have a wide range of models that we’ve used at both core and edge and have been happy with them over the years.
One important part of our current toolset for managing switches is the HP Procurve Manager Plus management tool (another part is the invaluable tips on the evil routers website). Once you move beyond a certain amount of switches it becomes inefficient to manage them all by hand and tools like this which allow you to bulk manage error and performance logging and manage switches in bulk become invaluable.
Continue reading →
Saturday, March 9, 2013
We’ve been migrating from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012 at work. One very interesting part of SCCM 2012 for us has been the support for Mac OSX that was added in SCCM 2012 SP1. We have about 70 Mac clients, I guess, on top of about 1500 Windows clients, and those 70 clients need a dis-proportionate amount of time to manage, not because of any problems with Mac OSX as such, but rather due to the lack of real tools available to manage a large desktop roll-out.
Continue reading →