Category: Microsoft

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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shaun.wilkinson2 Comments
DPM, Microsoft

Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) – How to Remove Old Backups (PowerShell)

So Microsoft DPM software is a pretty decent backup solution, but it does have a nasty tendency to not remove old backups correctly even if retention policies are set. This can happen for a multitude of reasons that I won’t go into.

This article is going to very quickly go over how you can remove backups outside of a certain time frame.

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Azure, Microsoft

AZ-100/AZ-103 – Implement and manage hybrid identities – Study Notes #20

This article covers the “Implement and manage hybrid identities” section of the AZ-100 and AZ-103 Exams and is part of my AZ-100 Study Notes series. Install and configure Azure AD Connect Azure AD Connect allows you to connect and sync between an On-Premise Active Directory and AAD. Detailed information on setting up Azure AD Connect can be found at – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/connect/active-directory-aadconnect-get-started-express Configure federation and single … Continue reading AZ-100/AZ-103 – Implement and manage hybrid identities – Study Notes #20

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Azure, Microsoft

AZ-100/AZ-103 – Manage Azure AD objects (users, groups, and devices) – Study Notes #19

This article covers the “Manage Azure AD objects (users, groups, and devices)” section of the AZ-100 and AZ-103 Exams and is part of my AZ-100 Study Notes series. Create users and groups Creating users and groups is fairly straightforward, navigate to Azure Active Directory and then select either Users or Groups as required. To create users – Select “New users” Provide the name and the … Continue reading AZ-100/AZ-103 – Manage Azure AD objects (users, groups, and devices) – Study Notes #19

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