Microsoft | I.T. Giffen.cloud

19 November 2022

Using a personalized domain with O365 Family

I want to start this post with the mention that Microsoft is going to be sunsetting this feature at the end of November 2023. So if this is something you are interested in… Hurry up as the opportunity is going away very soon. As per the Microsoft Support page (link):

“Starting November 30, 2023, Microsoft 365 Personal or Microsoft 365 Family subscribers will no longer be able to create a new personalized email address associated with their Outlook.com inbox,”

Associating and using a personal domain with my O365 Family plan to allow personalized email addresses is something that has really appealed to me, being that I live and work in the tech realm. However, to my disappointment, this feature is only officially supported by Microsoft thru GoDaddy.

I personally do not want to have to switch registrars though. I’m quite happy with the folks that host my name servers and I will not budge on that. GoDaddy might be “ok” at best for tech newb with zero experience. I personally have had bad experiences with them, and their constant attempts of upselling you at every click I find extremely annoying. So then I was left trying to figure out how to still get my domain without switching registrars. Thankfully, thanks to the Internet, i was able to discover that someone already solved my problem. I found a post on Reddit by u/khatarian that explained what I needed to do.

Reminder: While this does work, it is not officially supported.

1) Open Outlook.com in your browser, open ‘Settings’ and go to the ‘Premium’ settings.
Click the “Get started” button under ‘Personalized email address’.

2) Click the button “Get a domain”. A new window will open.

3) Copy the URL of the new window that opens, it will appear like: https://domainconnect.godaddy.com/v2/domainTemplates/providers/outlook.com/services/personalizedoutlookemail/apply?mxRecordValue=XXXXXXXXX&state=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.

The part that is needed is “mxRecordValue=XXXXXXXXX” The XXXXXXXXX is a unique ID that Microsoft will check for during DNS verification. Save that in notepad for later…

4) Go to your own personal site’s DNS settings and add the following values, replacing XXXXXXXXX with the value you retrieved in step 3.
Note: Your DNS manager may use different syntax for it’s entries. Please adapt these entries accordingly. The dot at the end is not a typo!

Name	TTL	Type	Value
@	1 hour	MX	0 XXXXXXXXX.pamx1.hotmail.com.
@	1 hour	TXT	v=spf1 include:outlook.com -all
autodiscover	1 hour	CNAME	autodiscover.outlook.com.
_dmarc	1 hour	TXT	v=DMARC1; p=none;
_domainconnect	1 hour	CNAME	_domainconnect.gd.domaincontrol.com.
_outlook	1 hour	TXT	XXXXXXXXX

FWIW – This is what the settings look like at NameCheap.com.

5) Return to your ‘Premium Settings’ in Outlook.com

6) Select and click the option “I already own a GoDaddy doamin”

7) Enter the personalized domain name that you used above and have configured the DNS entries for.

8) Click the “Sign in” button and then close the page it opens.

9) Woo-Hoo! You did it. It should now say that you are connected to the domain.

I’m confirmed that it works for one of the domains I own. I couldn’t be happier. Now it’s time for you to do it before the end of November 2023!

Category: Microsoft, Office | LEAVE A COMMENT

26 September 2022

Microsoft | Learn

I decided to write a little bit about the Microsoft Learn portal. We all know that Microsoft is one (if not the) standard for many business applications and cloud offerings. They also offer certifications on their products from basic fundamentals all the way up to the expert level. But how do you learn, practice, and eventually master the skills/knowledge needed to either professionally use or become certified in any of the Microsoft family of technologies? Well, the answer is Microsoft Learn.

The Microsoft Learn portal can really meet all of your learning needs. It can provide you the documentation for any of their current product offerings. It can walk you through any of the Microsoft exams, and the skills they cover. Microsoft has put together self-paced training modules that you can use. And best of all, they basically offer some sort of module for everything they offer. If you are interested in learning anything Microsoft-related, then it really behooves you to start looking at the Microsoft Learn site to begin or supplement your learning materials.

There is so much knowledge that is just sitting there, waiting for you. If it’s a Microsoft product, and you’re interested in it, then Microsoft Learn is where you need to go!

Category: Microsoft, Microsoft, Training | LEAVE A COMMENT

30 May 2022

Enable/Disable Multiple RDP Sessions

So the caveat to this article is that this is specifically for Windows Servers. If you’re trying to enable multiple RDP sessions on Windows 10 or 11, you’ll need to do some further googling to find out how to do that – as this alone won’t be enough.

Enable Multiple RDP Sessions

Log into the server you are trying to enable multiple Remote Desktop sessions on.
Click on the start menu button, type “gpedit.msc” and open it.
Navigate to ‘Computer Configuration’ -> ‘Administrative Templates’ -> ‘Windows Components’ -> ‘Remote Desktop Services’ -> ‘Remote Desktop Session Host’ -> ‘Connections’.
Set “Restrict Remote Desktop Services user to a single Remote Desktop Services session” to ‘Disabled’.
Double-click on “Limit number of connections” and set the value of the RD Maximum Connections allowed to ‘999999’.

Disable Multiple RDP Sessions

Log into the server that allows multiple Remote Desktop sessions.
Click on the start menu button, type “gpedit.msc” and open it.
Navigate to ‘Computer Configuration’ -> ‘Administrative Templates’ -> ‘Windows Components’ -> ‘Remote Desktop Services’ -> ‘Remote Desktop Session Host’ -> ‘Connections’.
Set “Restrict Remote Desktop Services user to a single Remote Desktop Services session” to ‘Enabled’.

Category: Microsoft, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | LEAVE A COMMENT

26 May 2022

Disable IP autoconfiguration

I ran into this last week when I was helping someone “fix” their server. They couldn’t reach, or ping, their host, and when running an “ipconfig /all” command it was returning that the machine’s IP was ‘duplicate’.

Worth Noting: So sometimes when a server reports that its’ IP is a ‘duplicate’ it can be a DHCP mishap. It can happen when a server is assigned a static IP that is within a DHCP pool, and because there was no reservation, DHCP hands the IP out to some other machine. Thus two machines are trying to use the same, duplicate, IP address. When that happens you’ll need to resolve it by creating an IP reservation for the “correct” machine, and then releasing the IP from the machine that “incorrectly” took the IP from the pool so it can be assigned a new IP.

The machine I was fixing lived in a subnet that did not use DHCP and only had machines that were statically assigned their IPs in it. So the possible resolution mentioned above did not fit my scenario. So, what could it be? Well if you have a static IP set, and the DHCP service is enabled, Windows likes to give you an address on the 169.x.x.x network. Which just breaks the ip traffic on your server. Here’s how to fix it…

Step 1.

Open a command prompt

Step 2. Enter

"ipconfig /all"

Find what your system’s preferred IP is and if autoconfiguration is enabled, and the name of the interface that they are on. You will need this for the next step.

Step 3. Enter

netsh interface ipv4 show interface

Find the index number that is assigned to the interface you identified in the step above, you will need it in the next step.

Step 4.

Run the command below, but replace ’69’ with the index number that you identified in the step above.

netsh interface ipv4 set interface 69 dadtransmits=0 store=persistent

Step 5. Enter

services.msc

Disable the DHCP Client service. If you ever revert from a static IP back to a DHCP IP, you will need to re-enable this service and set it back to automatic.

Step 6.

Restart your computer.
After your system reboots, its static IP should now be the correct IP you had configured on it, and your IP traffic to/from it should be back to normal.

Congratulations, autoconfiguration has been disabled.

Category: Microsoft, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | LEAVE A COMMENT

8 May 2022

Was the file downloaded?

If you’re ever tracking down where a suspicious came from, it can be hard to determine if it was downloaded off of the “dirty” internet, or if someone actually created the file locally on the machine. Well if you know how to check the file’s alternative data stream, it actually becomes pretty easy to determine if it was in fact downloaded. You don’t know what the alternate data stream is, or how to check? We can fix that.

First a little background. The “Zone Identifier Alternate Data Stream” is often referred to as the Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW). The MOTW was actually a security feature first introduced by Internet Explorer for determining how to run saved HTML webpages. It has since grown to become implemented into many other file types. Whenever a file is downloaded, your browser implements MOTW by utilizing a feature of the NTFS file system called the alternate data stream (ADS) to associate a data stream to that file. The browser creates an ADS called “Zone.Identifier” and then adds the ZoneId to the stream to specify where the file came from. The ADS will be <file>:Zone.Identifier.

The ZoneId can have the following values:

0. Local Computer
1. Local Intranet
2. Trusted Sites
3. Internet
4. Restricted Sites

Enough of the background… Let us get back to the hands-on part.

To check the files’ ADS & ZoneId from a command prompt, use the following syntax. The “file” we’re going to be checking is named: file.ext

notepad file.ext:Zone.Identifier

Alternatively, to check the file with PowerShell, use either of the following cmdlets.

Get-Item .\file.ext -Stream *

Get-Content .\file.ext -Stream Zone.Identifier

Category: Microsoft, PowerShell | LEAVE A COMMENT

2 May 2022

Search GPO Settings

So if you know anything about managing Windows systems then you know about GPOs. In my honest opinion, GPOs are one of the greatest tools available in Windows. GPOs let you administratively manage all aspects of your computers. You can literally set about 99.9999% of any settings you ever wanted to configure on a computer.

One of the things that make GPOs so great is that it is expandable in that you can add new administrative templates as you add new software to your workstations in your domain. So not only can you manage just about any Microsoft or Windows setting, but you can also add in templates for third-party software from most of the big software venders and enterprise applications, as well as add new templates when new Microsoft releases new OSes and software.

The biggest downside of GPOs is that they can feel like a daunting wall when you first get started implementing them simply because there are sooo many settings that you can potentially configure – where to begin!?! And how do you figure out where to set some of those really odd settings. Well don’t worry, I don’t know anyone that remembers exactly where each setting is. For me, there are two resources that I regularly use to help me find the settings that I want to configure.

1 – https://gpsearch.azurewebsites.net/

This is an official Microsoft tool that lets you search all of the various settings that are available to you in all Microsoft products. It’s a great resource to find where things are set just by using a keyword. Think of it as “Bing” (or “Google”) for GPOs. Out of these two links, this site is the easiest to navigate when looking specifically for Microsoft and Windows settings.

2 – https://admx.help/

This site includes all of the Microsoft settings, but where it really shines is all of the third-party software settings it has indexed for you. If need to figure out where to set something in Chrome or Adobe or any other software, this site has you covered.

3 – https://reg2ps.azurewebsites.net/

So this last site is just a bonus as it is not exactly a GPO site, but it comes in handy. It’s a way to convert registry settings into powershell commands that you can run. Paste your reg key into it and it will spit out the corresponding PS command for it.

Category: Microsoft, Windows 10, Windows 2012/2012R2, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | LEAVE A COMMENT

24 February 2022

Changing Your Password from an RDP Session

So here’s the scenario, you’ve RDP-ed into a server and you want to change your password. You try to hit CRTL+ATL+DEL but instead of it getting sent to the remote computer, it opens on your local machine. Blah! That is not what we want… How do we get to a place where we can change the password for the account that was used in the RDP session?

One way to send it within the RDP session is to launch the on-screen keyboard. To launch it, simply click on the ‘Start Menu’ and type “osk”, then click on the result to open the keyboard. With the OSK on screen, press and hold “CTRL+ALT” on your physical keyboard, and click “DEL” on the virtual keyboard button.

The easiest way to bring up the menu from where you can change your password is to press CRTL+ALT+END in the RDP window. Now if you are RDP-ed from a mac, you’ll need to do a CRTL+ALT+Fn+Backspace or CRTL+ALT+Fn+Right-Arrow to bring up the menu.

Category: Microsoft, Windows 10, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | LEAVE A COMMENT

5 January 2022

Reset password on locked-out Domain Admin

Sometimes things happen and a password gets forgotten or lost, or in the worst case it wasn’t updated in your password management tool after it was changed. We’ve likely all had to bug another admin to reset our password for one system or another. It happens. But what happens if you are the lone Domain Admin and lock yourself out? Luckily, there is a way to get back in if you do get locked out.

Download the Windows Server 2016 ISO.
Attach the ISO to your DC virtual machine.
Reboot the VM into the ISO
Select: Repair your Computer -> Troubleshoot -> Command Prompt
At the command prompt, run the following commands:

cd c:\Windows\System32
ren osk.exe osk.old
copy c:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe osk.exe

Reboot the Server.
Launch the on-screen keyboard and PowerShell will open
At the Powershell prompt, run the following command, replacing <PASSWORD> with the password of your choice:

Net user Administrator <PASSWORD>

Revert file changes in your System32 folder, renaming ‘osk.old’ back to ‘osk.exe’.

And there you have it folks, you are now able to log back in with your Domain Admin account. This works because while the DC does not have a local Administrator account, it somehow realizes that and resets the Domain Admin. Yes it is a little bit of black magic fuckery in that regard… But it worked and got you back in, so who are we to complain.

Category: Microsoft, Windows 2012/2012R2, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | LEAVE A COMMENT

30 December 2021

Open and Extract .tar files on Windows

What I’m about to say might be a surprise to you… But you don’t need to install any sort of 3rd party software (like 7zip or WinZip) to extract tarball files on WIndows. Windows 10 actually has the functionality built-in. I know, I was just as surprised to learn about it as you are. From the command line, you can use the “Tar” command to easily extract .tar, .gz, or tar.gz files.

For folks out there that don’t know;

A tarball file, ‘.tar’, is just a type of archived file. They are basically, a collection of files that have been merged into one single file.
Gzip files, ‘.gz’, are a type of compressed file and it is used to save on the amount of space that a file uses on the hard drive.
If you’re following along, then you’ll already have realized that a ‘.tar.gz’ file means that it is just a compressed archive file.

Here’s how to extract your tarball file in Windows 10.

Open the ‘Start Menu’ and search for “cmd”. Right-click on “Command Prompt” and select “Run as administrator“.

Enter the following command inside the window.

tar -xvzf "Path to file" -C "Path to destination"

Example:

tar -xvzf C:\Source\file.tar.gz -C C:\Destination\

This example will extract the contents of the ‘file.tar.gz’ file from the “C:\Source\” folder to the “C:\Destination\” folder.
Note: Make sure the ‘-C’ parameter before the path to the destination is an uppercase.

The parameters explained:

x — instructs tar to extract the archived content.
v — verbose mode. This is optional to display the extraction process. Otherwise, you will only see a blinking cursor until the process is complete.
z — instructs tar to uncompress the content with gzip.
f — provides tar the name of the file you’re about to extract.
–C — uppercase and with a hypen, this tells tar to change folders to the specified folder

Category: Microsoft, Windows 10 | 3 Comments

9 June 2021

SCCM Client Actions

If you use SCCM or have ever had to mess with Configuration Manager on a computer that runs Software Center, then you have seen all of the client actions that you can run. That said, like most of us when we started using SCCM or Configuration Manager we knew we had to run some/all of the actions to make the changes we made in SCCM reflect on the computer we were trying to push something to. After a while, you start to realize that you can get by running just one or two actions instead of all of them. But, using myself as an example, aside from knowing you needed to run them you likely didn’t know what they actually did. For me, it was always something that I was going to “Google” later and figure out what they did at some future time. Well, I recently reached that future point-in-time and thought I’d share the collection (SCCM pun intended) of answers that I found. Hopeful what I’ve complied helps out someone else that finally decided to search about it…

Application Deployment Evaluation Cycle – This action re-evaluates the requirement rules for all deployments. If an application is required, and not installed when the Application Deployment Evaluation Cycle runs, Configuration Manager automatically triggers a re-install. The Application Deployment Evaluation Cycle only applies to applications and not to the packages. The default value is set to run every 7 days.
Branch Distribution Point Maintenance Task – Verifies any pre-staged packages and downloads any that do not exist on the branch distribution point. While Technet does not explicitly state it, I believe this task is useful only on branch distribution points and is ignored on normal clients.
Discovery Data Collection Cycle – This causes the client to generate a new discovery data record (DDR). When the DDR is processed by the site server, Discovery Data Manager adds or updates resource information from the DDR in the site database.
File Collection Cycle – When a file is specified for collection, the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 software inventory agent searches for that file when it runs a software inventory scan on each client in the site. If the software inventory client agent finds a file that should be collected, the file is attached to the inventory file and sent to the site server. This action differs from software inventory in that it actually sends the file to the site server so that it can be later viewed using Resource Explorer. This is a part of SCCM inventory functionality.
Hardware Inventory Cycle – Collects information such as available disk space, processor type, and the operating system about each computer. This is a part of SCCM inventory functionality.
Machine Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle – The client downloads its policy on a schedule. By default, this value is configured to every 60 minutes and is configured with the option Policy polling interval (minutes). However, there might be occasions when you want to initiate ad-hoc policy retrieval from the client—for example, in a troubleshooting scenario or when testing. This action initiates ad-hoc machine policy retrieval from the client outside its scheduled polling interval.
Send Unsent State Messages – This tool sends State Messages that are cached on the ConfigMgr client to the ConfigMgr server.
Software Inventory Cycle – Collects software inventory data directly from files (such as .exe files) by inventorying the file header information. Configuration Manager 2007 can also inventory unknown files — files that do not have detailed information in their file headers. This provides a flexible, easy-to-maintain software inventory method. You can also have Configuration Manager 2007 collect copies of files that you specify. Software inventory and collected file information for a client can be viewed using Resource Explorer. This is a part of SCCM inventory functionality.
Software Metering Usage Report Cycle – Collects the data that allows you to monitor and client software usage.
Software Updates Deployment Evaluation Cycle – Initiates a scan for software updates compliance. Before client computers can scan for software update compliance, the software updates environment must be configured.
Software Updates Scan Cycle – Just after a software update installation completes, a scan is initiated to verify that the update is no longer required and to create a new state message that indicates the update has been installed. When the installation has finished but a restart is necessary, the state will indicate that the client computer is pending a restart.
State Message Cache Cleanup – This tool clears State Messages that are cached on the ConfigMgr client.
User Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle – Similar to Machine Policy Retrieval & Evaluation Cycle, but this action initiates ad-hoc user policy retrieval from the client outside its scheduled polling interval.
Windows Installer Source List Update Cycle – Causes the Product Source Update Manager to complete a full update cycle. When you install an application using Windows Installer, those Windows Installer applications try to return to the path they were installed from when they need to install new components, repair the application, or update the application. This location is called the Windows Installer source location. Windows Installer Source Location Manager can automatically search Configuration Manager 2007 distribution points for the source files, even if the application was not originally installed from a distribution point.

For anyone interested, the descriptions above are not my own. I’ve copied them from here and here.

Category: Microsoft, SCCM | LEAVE A COMMENT