How to flash the B650M DS3H with Q-Flash Plus

Image credit: Speedrookie/Reddit

Q-Flash Plus is a feature of newer motherboards that allows you to flash the BIOS without the need of a CPU, RAM or video card. It just requires a power supply for the motherboard and a specially formatted USB containing the bios update file.

This feature is especially useful due to reports of the latest AMD Ryzen 7000 series burning out in some circumstances, which was something I was very keen to avoid with my latest computer build and which appears to be remediated with the latest BIOS releases on most boards.

I’ll cover step-by-step the process for my own Gigabyte B650M DS3H, but the overall steps will be extremely similar for most boards.

shaun.wilkinsonMay 29, 2023May 26, 2023Leave a comment

Microsoft

How to Fix Power BI “Due to a configuration change made by your administrator, or because you moved to a new location, you must use multi-factor authentication to access”

We started to receive this error on the Microsoft “Emissions Impact Dashboard” recently. Although the error message was clear enough I wasn’t sure how I could provide MFA to Power BI and the majority of the guidance online states to remove MFA as a requirement which is almost always a poor option in my experience. The error we were receiving was as follows via an … Continue reading How to Fix Power BI “Due to a configuration change made by your administrator, or because you moved to a new location, you must use multi-factor authentication to access”

shaun.wilkinsonMay 26, 2023May 25, 2023Leave a comment

Azure, Microsoft, PowerShell

How to Export Azure DevOps Service Connection Details using PowerShell

I’ve recently been looking to report on and remove old unneeded Azure Service Connections found in Azure DevOps and found that any actual information on how to do this or existing scripts to do it for me were sorely lacking. As such I’ve developed a working example, which can be found in the article below.

shaun.wilkinsonMay 15, 2023May 15, 2023Leave a comment

Azure, Microsoft

Unable to Break Lease on Azure Blob Storage due to attached Virtual Machine

I recently came across a situation whereby I wasn’t able to break a lease on an old .vhd file within Blob Storage. The issue was caused by a Virtual Machine which had since been deleted but still retained a lease lock on the file.

Azure will helpfully tell you which resource has the file leased and give the error message “All selected blobs are currently leased as virtual machine disks. Breaking the leases on these blobs is not supported.”, as in the image below, but this is only so much use when the Portal refuses to actually break the lease for you.

shaun.wilkinsonApril 28, 2023April 28, 2023Leave a comment

Microsoft, Outlook

Exchange 2013/2016 – Select an Organizational Unit shows “There are no items to show in this view”

This was a frustrating issue to deal with in a large environment, effectively if you open any “Select an Organization Until” window such as when configuring rules for dynamics distribution groups you may see either a small number of OU records or no OU records at all, with the window simply stating “There are no items to show in this view”.

This most often occurs after Cumulative Updates are applied to a server but may be caused by a lack of configuration or a misconfiguration of the Exchange servers and will present as in the image below –

shaun.wilkinsonNovember 3, 2022November 3, 2022Leave a comment

Datto

Datto RMM – Close Alerts Older Than, using PowerShell

The PowerShell script below will connect to Datto RMM’s cloud platform, specifically the Merlot API, and close all non-critical alerts older than a specified date. This is all easily configurable and by simply changing the API endpoints should allow you to connect to any of Datto’s available regions.

For information on enabling or configuring the Datto API please refer to the official documentation – https://rmm.datto.com/help/en/Content/2SETUP/APIv2.htm

shaun.wilkinsonOctober 5, 2022October 5, 2022Leave a comment

Microsoft, Outlook

Exchange – Remove List of Permissions from Exchange Mailboxes

The PowerShell code below will take a CSV list of mailboxes and Users/Groups to remove from that mailbox. This allows you to quickly and efficiently remove old permissions across Exchange.

shaun.wilkinsonSeptember 14, 2022September 14, 2022Leave a comment

Microsoft, PowerShell

PowerShell – How-To Retrieve SPN’s for all Servers

Yet another short one with little context or reason.

A colleague of mine needed a list of all Service Principal Names assigned to all servers on the estate. Searches online brought us to a few potential solutions, most of which included the use of some difficult to use and understand .NET classes which appeared to be limited to only 1000 results.

So that got me thinking, these are just Active Directory attributes so why not use PowerShells very own Get-ADComputer?

The script below will list every single server in Active Directory and all assigned SPN’s, it will then export the list to a CSV.

shaun.wilkinsonJune 30, 2022June 27, 2022Leave a comment

Uncategorized

Node.JS – How-To Patch CosmosDB Collections and Nested Items

This will be a bit of a reference guide to updating a CosmosDB collections and nested items in a nice manner. This thread will not cover how to use the CosmosDB package in Node.JS and it will assume you’ve successfully connected to a database.

I will use the example of updating the signature of a user of a forum where that signature is stored in a collection which is the overall thread and then nested collections which are the individual comments.

shaun.wilkinsonJune 28, 2022Leave a comment

PowerShell

PowerShell – Locate Inactive Users in Active Directory / Exchange On-Prem

Another short article with little context today.

The PowerShell script below will produce a report showing the Last Logon time of all enabled Active Directory users, it will also connect to Exchange On-Premise and request the last logon date of the mailbox. This can be useful to identify user accounts which are no longer in active use, even in organisations where mailboxes may have been retained once a user left.

There’s also a nifty status update built in that will tell you exactly how far the script has progressed and show an estimated time to completion.

shaun.wilkinsonJune 27, 2022June 24, 20221 Comment

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