Microsoft Windows 10 has some pretty intrusive data gathering built into the operating system. It collects anonymous and not-so-anonymous data from users of the Operating System. Today, MS released 4 Optional Updates to bring the Win 10 Style Telemetry and Data Gathering to previous versions of Windows. The 4 updates… Continue reading
I’m putting this out there for anyone else. For the last 3 months I had a windows 2008 R2 server that would not apply windows updates. “An unknown error has occurred” is all I would get. This was fixed today. The cause seemed to be an Disk Filter applied to… Continue reading
In Microsoft Exchange OWA (outlook web access) a user will attempt to change the account password and encounter an error “The password supplied does not meet the minimum security requirements”. This error happens even though the GPO Policy has password complexity disabled. The cause of the error is the minimum… Continue reading
SCEP (Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol) is a standard solution for admins wishing to deploy certificates to devices with little interaction and no manual uploading/downloading of cert files between systems. NDES (Network Device Enrollment Service) is Microsoft’s implementation of SCEP. NDES and SCEP are essentially 2 labels for the same service…. Continue reading
My company uses MS Exchange 2013 for mail, contacts, calendars, and tasks. However, we have a lot of users on LInux desktops that can’t run Outlook. For others, the new Outlook 2013 is a horrible monstrosity of Flat icons on all all white background that burns your eyes after a… Continue reading
Yes, in Exchange 2013, users were given the ability to edit their user pictures that is stored in the LDAP for display on their profile across Microsoft’s suite of products. Seems like a harmless function right? Microsoft is so desperate to be viewed as a ‘cool social media like product’… Continue reading
I have had this issue come up a few times. I had the need to setup an employee’s laptop with access to an Exchange 2013 mailbox. However, the employee was using a laptop that was not a domain member and could not use autodiscover to automate Outlook setup. In Exchange… Continue reading
Any admin knows that there are always computer and user accounts in AD that become stale and unused. It’s good practice to remove these old accounts from AD. Here’s how I do it. From any Domain Controller, open a command prompt and try the following. dsquery computer -inactive 8 -limit… Continue reading
Exchange 2010 has this feature in active sync where the admin can setup rules to allow certain devices to connect via ActiveSync Access Rules. Device Access Rules can be setup so that only certain devices can connect and all other devices will be quarantined until an admin can act on… Continue reading
This is a usable example showing how to check for a 32 bit OS vs a 64 bit OS in MS windows within a batch file. This is very useful when deploying certain applications through MS Group Policy. Example from a .bat file: @echo off Set RegQry=HKLMHardwareDescriptionSystemCentralProcessor REG.exe Query %RegQry%… Continue reading
Mike's Guides to Learning Boto3 Volume 1: Amazon AWS Connectivity and Basic VPC Networking
Mike's Guides to Learning Boto3 Volume 2: AWS S3 Storage: Buckets, Files, Management, and Security
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