Some thoughts on Group Policy design

Group Policy has been with us for well over 12 years now and has turned out to be a good tool for deploying configurations to your users, servers and clients. A summary of Group Policy in general is beyond what I want to say here so for anyone looking for that before reading on have …

New preview version of Azure AD PowerShell available (Yes, it now supports ADAL!)

I guess the title says it all! Here is the link to the Microsoft Connect site to download: http://connect.microsoft.com/site1164/ Connect-MSOLService now brings up the familiar ADAL prompt with MFA and ADFS support etc. Make sure to read the release notes included, and you should probably uninstall the Microsoft Online Sign In assistant. Here are the …

Office Modern Authentication (ADAL) and Autodiscover

The introduction of Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) support in Office 2013 and Office 265 ProPlus is great news. The Office suite of applications is now able to take advantage of advanced authentication options like federated SSO and MFA. Using ADAL with Office is referred to using Office with modern authentication. Modern authentication was recently …

RunAs Radio Azure RMS Podcast

I just spent half an hour talking to RunAs Radio host Richard Campbell about Azure RMS. The show will go live on May 13th. RunAs Radio is a weekly Internet Audio Talk Show for IT Professionals working with Microsoft products. The full range of IT topics is covered from a Microsoft-centric viewpoint. I was not …

When configuring the Azure Load Balancer for Remote Desktop Gateway…

make sure you DO NOT enable Direct Server Return on your endpoint Load Balanced Set: In November of 2014 support was added for Source IP Affinity (also known as session affinity or client IP affinity) in the Azure Load Balancer. Before that it was not compatible with Remote Desktop Gateway. You could sort of load …

The Case of the Missing Technical Preview build

I am trying out the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and have been running build 9926 for some time. Today (19032015) Microsoft released build 10041 and I installed it immediately, of course. Not surprisingly I had some problems which were so bad that I reverted back to the 9926 build. I later figured out that it …

Add the Azure VM agent to existing Virtual Machines

Here is a quick rundown of how to add the base VM agent to existing Azure VMs: Find all your VMs that currently do not have the agent installed: Get-AzureVM  | where { $_.GuestAgentStatus -eq $null } or this variation if you only want to get the VMs that are actually running: Get-AzureVM  | where …

Customized claims in ADFS

Introduction The claims pipeline in ADFS is an interesting piece of software. I recently had a chance to re-familiarize myself with it. A third party SaaS application used an organizations internal employee numbers together with their own customer number for that organization to uniquely identify users. This called for issuing a claim to the SaaS …

How to install the Azure Operational Insights agent on an Azure VM using PowerShell

Most of the Azure VM extensions have their own specialized PowerShell cmdlets to configure them, e.g. Set-AzureAccessExtension, Set-AzureVMBGInfoExtension, Set-AzureVMMicrosoftAntimalwareExtension etc. But you can also, to some extent, use the generic Set-AzureVMExtension. The example below show how to use it to install and configure the Operational Insights agent/extension in your Azure VM: Get-AzureVM -ServiceName <cloud service …