Category: Microsoft

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”

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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.

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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.

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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 –

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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.

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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.

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shaun.wilkinson1 Comment
Microsoft, PowerShell

PowerShell – How to Retrieve Specific Events From All Servers

Occasionally you may have to implement something which will improve the security of your organisation but that does introduce a risk. Often the correct way to determine if it will cause issues is to enable logging and then to review those logs.

But what if you don’t have centralised logging?

This article does not replace a fully functional centralised event logging system which I would strongly suggest anybody have, however, it will allow you to retrieve specific logs from all servers in your estate. If your estate is too large then the script can be modified to instead of storing all of the data in the $allEvents variable you could simply append it to an Excel file inside of the for each loop.

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Microsoft

Exchange 2016 – User account isn’t a member of the ‘Schema Admins’ or ‘Enterprise Admins’ group

This is a frustrating issue to come across when trying to roll out AD Schema Updates during an Exchange Cumulative Upgrade. But luckily it’s normally quite simple to resolve, this article will cover the various solutions from most to least likely to fix the issue.

Continue reading “Exchange 2016 – User account isn’t a member of the ‘Schema Admins’ or ‘Enterprise Admins’ group”
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