How to opt in to Microsoft Update with PowerShell

For Windows to retreive updates from Microsoft Update, as opposed to Windows Update (which is the default), you have to opt in. This is usually done through the Windows Update GUI by selecting “Get updates for other Microsoft Products”: This becomes tedious very quickly so here’s how you can do it with PowerShell: https://gist.github.com/morgansimonsen/8039966 To …

Windows Azure compute cores and you

By default, every Windows Azure subscription has a limit of 20 compute cores. This applies to both VMs (IaaS) and worker roles (PaaS). Fortunately this is a soft limit and you can increase it by submitting a support ticket to the Windows Azure team through the management portal here. The following table lists the number …

How to upload an image VHD to Windows Azure using CSUpload

Introduction One of the exciting new possibilites in Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the ability to create Virtual Machine images (VHD files) locally and upload them to your own image store in Windows Azure, and use them as the basis for new VMs. In this article I will demonstrate the process of …

More free stuff in Windows Azure Active Directory

Microsoft announced today that they will offer two features in Windows Azure Active Directory free of charge; Access Control and Core Directory and Authentication. Access Control provides centralized authentication and authorization by integrating with consumer identity providers such as Facebook or by using an on-premises deployment of the Windows Server Active Directory service. With Access …

Which accounts can I assign as Windows Azure co-administrators?

Recently the ability to add co-administrators to you Windows Azure portal was migrated from the old Silverlight portal to the new HTML 5 portal. Happy times! You can only add valid Microsoft Accounts or accounts from Windows Azure Active Directory as co-administrators. Office 365 uses Windows Azure Active Directory to if you have an account …

Decoding some certificate enrollment client events

The Events Windows clients can request certificates on their own (autoenrollment) or with the help of a user. When enrolling for a certificate you may find this pair of events in your Application log: Source: Microsoft-Windows-CertificateServicesClient-CertEnroll Event ID: 64 Level: Information User: S-1-5-18 User Name: NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM Computer: <servername> Description: Certificate enrollment for Local system …

Enabling notify-driven replication across Active Directory sites

Introduction Active Directory sites, site links and site link bridges exist to be able to tell the directory service about the network’s physical topology. Specifically to identiy which parts of it are well connected and where there are slow WAN links. The rule of thumb here is that all systems that are connected with at …

How to connect your on-premise network to Windows Azure using Windows Server as a VPN gateway

Introduction Together with the launch of Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) this summer, Microsoft also introduced a way for customers to connect their on-premise networks with Windows Azure using site-to-site VPN. The service responsibel for this feature is called Windows Azure Gateway. It uses IPSec to establish a site-to-site VPN tunnel between your …