Various Tips and Tricks
One of my hosted lab environments ran into series of issues, and after unplanned maintenance there were multiple problems to resolve. The below error with a faulting ntdll.dll module was something I recall seeing many years ago with a Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) deployment where the MOM agent simply would not start. On every single attempt to start the service it would crash with the erro… Read the rest “Faulting Module Name NTdll.dll”
Unfortunately issues can arise when third-party tools are used to modify TLS settings on a Windows Server. While these utilities are often intended to simplify the process of hardening or tuning protocols, they can introduce serious side effects. Especially in environments running applications like Exchange Server, IIS or other components that depend on schannel. Misapplied registry changes, unsu… Read the rest “HealthChecker Script & Schannel TLS Registry Issues”
Now that multiple services have stopped supporting IE11 coupled with the end of support for legacy Edge, it is imperative that we transition to an updated browser on all of our devices. IE11 is already unsupported for multiple Microsoft services, and the list will grow over time. For example Microsoft Teams support ceased on the 30th November 2020, and overall Microsoft 365 support ends on the 17t… Read the rest “QuickTip – Removing IE11 Via Command Line”
Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) are protocols that provide secure communications. Today several versions of these protocols exist, and not all of them are considered secure by Microsoft or other security companies.
Schannel is a Security Support Provider (SSP) that implements the SSL, TLS and Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Internet standard authentication pro… Read the rest “TLS Musings”
When you try to install a PowerShell module or connect to the PowerShell Repository you may get the below error messages:
WARNING: Unable to download from URI 'https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=627338&clcid=0x409' to ''.
WARNING: Unable to download the list of available providers. Check your internet connection.
For make most glorious benefit engine of search:
PackageManagement\Install-Packag… Read the rest “Unable To Install PowerShell Modules – Unable To Download From URI Error”
Installing a Web Application Proxy (WAP) server consists of two distinct actions. The first is installing the Remote Access role, and the second is to then configure the role. The act of configuring Remote Access enables WAP to function as an AD FS proxy, and optionally enables you to also publish other applications.
Over time some of those servers may have been replaced without fully uninstallin… Read the rest “Quick Tip – Manually Removing WAP Server”
To remove duplicates using PowerShell is exceedingly straightfroward. However, I have a habit of forgetting the cmdlet so parking this here for future reference.
For example, we can use the Get-Unique cmdlet or Select-Object -Unique parameter.
As a simple example:
The Get-Unique cmdlet compares each item in a sorted list to the next item, eliminates duplicates, and returns only… Read the rest “Quick Tip – Get Unique Instances In PowerShell”
This week I was fortunate to return to one of my favourite customers, to help with Exchange 2010 migration activities. As we all know, Exchange 2010 will exit out of extended support on the 14th of January 2020.
Fortunately they are progressing very well with moving all mailboxes off Exchange 2010, and one of the last remaining items was to review SMTP mail flow through the Exchange 2010 Hub trans… Read the rest “Checking Exchange SMTP Logs To Determine Usage”
With my customer facing role, there are lot of demonstrations to enterprise customers. Manually reverting machines back to the initial starting point for the next demo can be time consuming and error prone.
One example of this is clearing out the contents on Window's Credential Manager. There is no option to do a block select to delete multiple entries at once. Worse still is that Modern Authent… Read the rest “Script to Clear Credman”
In current versions of Windows the venerable snipping tool (snippingtool.exe) has been updated with improved functionality.
This is the Snipping Tool from a Windows 7 lab machine:
Clicking on Options we see:
The below were taken from my Windows 10 build 1803 machine. Note that there are now additional buttons present.
Specifically the Mode and Delay b… Read the rest “QuickTip–Delay Functionality In Windows Snipping Tool”