Microsoft

I recently ran into an interesting situation where my Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 stopped working. As a bit of background, I had recently moved the software to a new server. A bit of tangent, but one of the things I love about Veeam’s Office 365 backup is how small it is. The download is less than 12 MB! That makes setup quick and easy. Back to the problem … There wasn’t anything that immediately stood out. The job wasn’t running based on its schedule, nor could I start it manually. Something was definitely up. ...

A tool that I have been aware of for awhile now, but haven’t paid too much attention to (until recently) is Chocolatey. What is it, you may be asking yourself? It is essentially a package manager for Windows that is run via the command line. Various ‘flavours’ are available, ranging from free (which is what I use) to paid options. At the moment, there are 4343 community maintained packages, so you’ll likely find at some of what you need there. ...

There are several tasks that I find myself doing often enough (not necessarily daily), to warrant automation. But even more so, it is those tasks that I don’t necessarily do often where I really appreciate the automation. Part of it is because of the time savings, but even more so, if it is automated, there are a lot fewer steps that I need to remember. A good example of this is employee terminations. A simple, but typical workflow that I see is along the lines of: ...

Earlier this year I wrote a few posts ( here, here, and here) where I collected a bunch Veeam Repository Best Practices; the purpose of those posts were somewhat two-fold at the time: a) I needed something to present at my first SWOVUG meeting, and b) I desperately needed a new repository at work. Despite being several months later, I still seem to be getting questions about what repository I went with and how I like. I figure if I at least blog about it I can point future questions here. ...

If you look *really* hard, can you find me? Probably not … I wasn’t there. I looked at my calendar recently while trying to book an appointment, and I quickly realized that I have a lot of vCommunity stuff going on for the next little bit (assuming my plans don’t get altered). In the off chance you are reading this and will be attending one of the events below, please feel free to reach out, even if for no other reason than to say ‘Hi’. ...

Hands-down, one of the new features I was most excited about with Veeam’s Next Big Thing announcement was the Office 365 integration. I know I’m not alone in this one either, as doing a quick Google for terms like ‘Veeam Office 365’ shows that this has been a demand from customers for a while now. To be specific, Veeam is introducing a backup product that will protect your hosted Exchange Online email. ...

The Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) I’m not as hands on with my infrastructure as I used to be (due to promotion and expansion of roles), but along with that I do find my time is far more valuable now. With that in mind, I made a conscious effort to learn at least some basic PowerShell commands for often requested tasks. I found myself wasting a lot of time opening ADUC, finding the user / OU I was looking for, and doing whatever task was required (ex. adding to a group, resetting password, disable password expiration, etc.). Prior to Office 365, we were on a hosted Exchange 2007 platform and did not have PowerShell access. One of the big motivators for the switch was to open up scripting access so that we could start to see time savings. ...

I recently came into a situation where I wanted to update the CA certificate on my Tintri T820 with a new one from Active Directory. As I went through the process I realized it was not just a point and click process, so I opted to grab some screen shots and document the process. To get started, you should (not mandatory but highly recommended) check to see what algorithm your AD is using. Mine was still using SHA1, which has already been deprecated by some of the newer web browsers (*ahem* Google Chrome, I’m looking at you). I figured if I was going to go through this process now, I might as well follow the best practice and upgrade to a newer, more secure algorithm. ...

A little while back I ran into an issue where I was trying to get a new certificate to work on a Windows XP (full patched) box, but for the life of me it just would not work. I spent a lot of time going through and checking the usual suspects (typo with the name, valid dates, certificate chain, etc.) and I finally came across these two interesting links regarding Windows XP and SHA2: ...