Insights

Holographic Brain ImageHolographic Brain Image

blog

  • Blog

    Firewall Settings for Connecting to Azure SQL Databases from an Azure VM

    Recently, I was helping a colleague troubleshoot connectivity issues between an Azure VM and Azure SQL Database.  The client architecture looks like this: The failing connections were coming from the DMZ.  Watching network traffic using Wireshark, we saw an attempt to connect to the Azure SQL Database on port 11029.  A Google search led me…

    Concurrency, Inc.
  • Blog

    Decom Lync/Skype after moving to Teams

    This is my working list for decom for older Lync and Skype deployments on prem for organizations that are moving to Microsoft Teams. **more info to be added around trunk removal. Look for disabled accounts that are still registered to Lync 2013 Get-CSuser | Disable-CSuser Get-CsConferenceDirectory | Remove-CsConferenceDirectory Check for Analog devices Get-CsAnalogDevice | Select-Object…

    Concurrency
  • Blog

    Changing Azure Account in Visual Studio Code

    I was using an account in Visual Studio Code to access a certain set of subscriptions I was working against and deploying to. This was prior to getting my pipelines ready, as that was my eventual deployment destination. In the meantime, I needed to change the account and noticed there wasn’t any GUI way to…

    Nathan Lasnoski
  • Blog

    Return JSON from Azure Functions with Python

    I was working on an Azure Function for an open source wildlife IoT project and came across a lack of documentation in docs.microsoft.com. I had successfully returned HTTP content from my Azure function, but wasn’t sure how to get it to return JSON so I could interpret it elsewhere. In this case I’m storing latitute (lat)…

    Nathan Lasnoski
  • Blog

    The CMDB Solves Yesterday’s Problems… the Cloud is Different

    I spent many years building CMDBs for companies. The promise was that if we could just get the configuration information into a centralized database we’d be able to better plan, build, and run IT by understanding the landscape of applications and how they work. We had a relatively slow moving technology picture, with the complexity…

    Nathan Lasnoski
  • Blog

    FRS to DFS-R SYSVOL Upgrade

    What is the SYSVOL? In simple terms, Active Directory’s SYSVOL exists on every Domain Controller in your domain. It contains your network’s synchronized public files that clients access. The default location is C:\Windows\SYSVOL but it can be placed anywhere during the Domain Controller Promotion (DCPromo) process. FRS vs DFS-R FRS is the legacy file replication…

    Concurrency, Inc.
  • Blog

    ServiceNow: Configure Multi-SSO IDP against Multiple Azure Active Directories

    ServiceNow offers Single Sign-On plugin functionality for your organization to leverage a different authority for authenticating into the platform. Most organizations typically find that they only have one identity provider to authenticate against, but a recent customer of ours is a service provider that manages multiple identity providers for their customers. Note that this blog post…

    Michael Dugan
  • Blog

    Microsoft VSS Backup Retryable Error

    What was going on? One of our customers reported an issue with how an Exchange server was backing up. The backups themselves were working alright, and the customer was able to perform test restores. However, one of the VSS writers was consistently showing an error state. You can check the status of all available VSS…

    Concurrency
  • Blog

    ServiceNow Order Guides – Cascading Variables

    What is an Order Guide?  Straight from the docs site: An order guide submits a single service catalog request that generates several items. Order guides allow you to define rules that identify which catalog items to include in a request.  This can be extremely useful in the (obvious) use case of user onboarding.  You also are…

    Concurrency