Windows
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.
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Monday, September 3, 2018
I talked previously about using Chocolatey for home use. It makes building a PC at home nice, simple and fast. It makes supporting non-technical friends and family nice and easy, ensuring you can build their computers how they want and keep them up-to-date with just a few simple commands (that can even be put in the scheduler, so neither you or they have to worry about them).
We’ve recently just completed a Windows 10 rollout at my college.
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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:
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Saturday, September 9, 2017
One of the things that I’ve always been interested in is automation, and being able to reproduce a ‘known state’ reliably and consistently. This applies at work when building servers or workstations thanks to tools like SCCM and Fog, and should be in your grasp at home or in even the smallest office, thanks to Chocolatey.
Not to make a fine point of it, between my last post and this one I’ve rebuilt my PC, installing windows from scratch and all my applications, prepared breakfast for my partner and myself, started some laundry, and dealt with the cat pulling the net curtains down in my study.
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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.
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Sunday, March 19, 2017
Microsoft’s march towards filling their operating system with adverts continues, with people upset to see adverts for OneDrive popping up in Windows Explorer. And lets be honest, we’re all right to be annoyed. I think that’s certainly pretty intrusive. The Next Web has an article on how to turn it off (though ironically, when I first visited their site on my iPad it tried to take over my whole screen. Hmm… …something… something… attend to the beam in your own eye.
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Wednesday, February 15, 2017
At work I tend to turn up to meetings with a MacBook Pro. This surprises a few people who know me as a former Microsoft MVP, a Windows Server/Infrastructure person and the manager of a IT system that is predominantly Windows based.
The MacBook Pro isn’t ideal; it’s a 15" 2010 model and it is starting to be a problem. Even with a SSD installed, it’s starting to get slow and cranky when it comes to waking up.
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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.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Just lately Microsoft seem to be determined to mix up brand names to confuse customers.
For a while now we’ve had OneDrive for Business, the product that is built on the back of totally has nothing to do with OneDrive. OneDrive is your typical cloud file sync platform… and actually one I like enough to make my primary cloud storage of choice. OneDrive for Business is the name Microsoft have decided to give to uploading documents to a personal document library in SharePoint, in particular SharePoint Online/Office365.
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Tuesday, August 27, 2013
After our recent Exchange 2013 rollout, we noticed a problem with the Exchange 2013 servers (virtual guests on a HyperV cluster) experiencing clock drift and ultimately bugchecking (aka blue screen) with 0x000000ef errors.
These crashes and clock drifts occurred once every couple of days and quite aside from the crashes, clock drift is a very big deal on any kind of server these days. While the crashes were disruptive in their own right, the potential problems caused by someone having to wait a bit to access their mailbox or receive a message is nothing to the problems that could be caused by the timestamp on an email being a day or two out.
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Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Let me just start this post by saying that professionally at least, I’m a happy Dell customer. I’ve built up a good relationship with them over the years, met senior Dell staff and we almost exclusively use their server & storage infrastructure where I work, we’ve used them for consultancy in the past, and I’ve been delighted with the results. This is not me hating on Dell.
But I am going to have to take them to the woodshed over a recent post by Andre Meier on their corporate blog, “Tablet matters - taking the right decision”.
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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.
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Thursday, February 7, 2013
When Windows 8 was first released to techies, I made the effort to install it on my main computer at home and use it in order to try and get used to it. I’ve always done this; if you work in technology you need to be up to date with technology. This install lasted for a bit longer than a month before I gave up on it and rolled back to Windows 7.
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