Author: shaun.wilkinson

Azure, Microsoft

Migrating Azure VM’s from On-Premise AD to Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AAD DS)

This will be a fairly short article on my experience migrating Azure Virtual Machines that were connected to our On-Premise Domain Controllers to Azure Active Directory Domain Services (DS). Luckily most of the servers had been configured in such a way as to reduce the usage of any domain users which simplified the process greatly, but I will cover what things to check below. Firstly, … Continue reading Migrating Azure VM’s from On-Premise AD to Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AAD DS)

shaun.wilkinsonLeave a comment
Azure, Microsoft, PowerShell

How to Easily Migrate your Entire On-Prem DNS to Azure

So as with many companies we’re shifting to a Cloud environment from aging physical systems, as part of this I came across a requirement to migrate our entire On-Premise DNS System which is hosted on a Windows Server into Azure.

I wasn’t about to start migrating a few hundred individual DNS Zones in this case as that doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun when it’s a seemingly repetitive task that I could instead script up so that’s what I did.

The instructions and code below are meant to get you in the right direction, the script is not necessarily production ready and could be improved greatly, if you take the time to do so please comment with any alterations you make and I’ll include them in this article.

Continue reading “How to Easily Migrate your Entire On-Prem DNS to Azure”
shaun.wilkinson2 Comments
Microsoft, Other

C#/ Unity – Building a 2D Genetic Algorithm

So this article will be a little different to most of what’s on this site, but the benefit to writing your own blog is you’re not limited on what you can post so here goes!

Today I’ll be demonstrating a 2D genetic algorithm using some fun little aliens, this will basically represent how genetics can diverge over generations, in this case selecting for the reddest coloured alien. I’ll also include how to introduce mutations over several generations.

This article is based on “How to build a genetic algorithm” by Wael Dimassi, which provided a good basis for this work.

This won’t cover any Unity basics as is more focused on the coding aspect.

Continue reading “C#/ Unity – Building a 2D Genetic Algorithm”
shaun.wilkinsonLeave a comment
PowerShell

Active Directory – How to Generate a Group Membership Report

Another small one today, the script below will generate a nice csv export of every single group and it’s active user membership from Active Directory. The next step would likely be to turn it into a nice Pivot Table for reviewing.

It should be fairly straightforward to change it to show all users or all users & computers etc as required.

Continue reading “Active Directory – How to Generate a Group Membership Report”
shaun.wilkinson1 Comment
Other

Raspberry Pi 3 – How to Output 4K Resolution to a TV

So I recently acquired a fairly nice LG smart TV with a 4k resolution which would be great if we could actually use it all with the connected Raspberry Pi, unfortunately, ‘officially’ the Pi only supports up to 1920×1080 @60fps.

But it’s a Pi and it’ll let us try anything we want so let’s make it run at 4k and see how it handles it.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi 3 – How to Output 4K Resolution to a TV”
shaun.wilkinsonLeave a comment
DPM, Microsoft

Data Protection Manager (DPM) – Scheduled Jobs Fail to Run

This is one of the most frustrating issues to come across as DPM will happily tell you it’s working perfectly fine unless you notice your most recent backup time doesn’t quite look right, especially as most of the time you’re going to spot this when you need to do a restore. But all is not lost, let’s get on to fixing it.

Continue reading “Data Protection Manager (DPM) – Scheduled Jobs Fail to Run”
shaun.wilkinsonLeave a comment
AntiVirus, DPM, Microsoft

DPM could not execute a WMI query. The query either returned an error or an empty result – Error 33507

So I recently came across this issue after rolling out Trend to a new Data Protection Manager (DPM) instance whereby I couldn’t create new protection groups as it was generating the following error –

Create protection group: ###### System failed:
Error 33507: DPM could not execute a WMI query. The query either returned an error or an empty result.
Recommended action: Retry the operation.

Luckily it proved to be a fairly simple issue to resolve.

Continue reading “DPM could not execute a WMI query. The query either returned an error or an empty result – Error 33507”
shaun.wilkinson1 Comment
Microsoft

Microsoft Teams – How to Generate an Easy Report of all Users & Teams

I’ve recently had a requirement to allow us to generate a report of all the users in our Microsoft Teams teams because as often seems to be the case it’s all grown a little organically and now we need to get it under control. The first step to any process like this though is to find out the current status of your systems and for this you need to be able to easily report on it.

This article will cover a brief script using PowerShell that will export all Teams and Users in those teams along with relevant details into a nice CSV which you can easily process to produce reports.

Continue reading “Microsoft Teams – How to Generate an Easy Report of all Users & Teams”
shaun.wilkinson2 Comments