Get-AzSubscription
I recently ran into a frustrating issue where I setup a new subscription in Azure and when I went to manage with Powershell I couldn’t see on the list that gets output from the following command:
(more…)
In my line of work we often evaluate new ways to do things, specifically new platforms for server hosting, disaster recovery, backups, etc.
One of the requests that often comes from vendors is “How big is your environment?”
Microsoft has the rather excellent “MAP” tool however I find it to be a bit slow, somewhat complex, and often returns a lot more information than I want… and not always everything I need.
To that end, I wrote the following powershell function and it has been a major help in automating these inventory requests:
(more…)
A colleague of mine recently solved one of the biggest pain points I have dealt with regarding Office365 – that is, Microsoft’s seemingly hit-or-miss modern authentication.
Symptoms look like this:
1. Outlook client can’t connect and/or authenticate for end-users
2. Turning on Azure MFA for an end-user ruins their life (and yours) because all office applications, teams, etc. break.
3. Admins have an impending sense of “dread” when setting up systems for new users because 80% of the time they are going to spend hours sorting out the above issues.
4. You call Microsoft Support complaining of these issues and they are eventually stumped and tell you to rebuild the desktop/laptop from scratch… great for end-users that deal with this issue 1 year into the job and rather like their systems as-is… -or- MS Support tells you to pop a registry key into the end-user’s system which just disables Modern Authentication all together – which may fix Outlook but leaves many many other things broken…
(more…)
Got into the office this morning and immediately started the scramble because of reports from several users that Microsoft Office365 TEAMS was not working (a key communication app for us and many other businesses).
Microsoft officially had no outages reported when I looked ~8:50 AM EST. So I think this is very fresh. Teams is currently only working on mobile devices for us. If you look at DownDetector.com (here: https://downdetector.com/status/teams/) the chart is telling. 0 reports of issues until around 8:20 AM they start trickling in, 7k+ reported issues by 9:30 AM.
Looks like Microsoft isn’t having a great start to the week. Back to phone calls and emails for now… If you can swing TEAMS on your mobile device though, thankfully that still works.
Side note, the WEB Application is unfortunately ALSO not working in our testing.
Confirmed from another news source… Microsoft IS having issues this morning:
https://www.onmsft.com/news/microsoft-teams-is-down-this-morning-the-company-is-investigating
Microsoft’s Twitter Feed for Office365 status can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/msft365status
If you have access to your office365 Admin portal, you can also see active issues here:
https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/servicehealth
Currently they show a TEAMS Service Degradation – “Can’t access Microsoft Teams” – reported/logged at 9:11 AM EST… the issue actually started around 8:20 AM EST based on reports in Down Detector.
Here is the explanation for the issue per what O365 Admins can see:
Current status: We’ve determined that an authentication certificate has expired causing users who have logged out and those that are still logged in to have issue using the service. We’re developing a fix to apply a new authentication certificate to the service which will remediate impact.
Scope of impact: This issue may potentially affect any of your users attempting to access Microsoft Teams.”
Auth certificate expiration… seriously 🙁
UPDATE/Correction:
The actual ticket states that the issue started at 8:15 AM EST. The ticket was LOGGED around 9:11 AM EST.
FIRST – I am stealing code here and re-sharing (with very little modification). All credit goes the fine gentleman that wrote these two articles, I would urge you to read them:
Bulk Add IP Access Restrictions to Azure App Service Using AZ Powershell
Bulk Add Cloudflares IPs to Azure App Service Access Restrictions Using AZ Powershell
I made a few minor modifications the provided code. First, I like to just run a lot of my Azure Powershell stuff from an ISE session and don’t like encapsulating everything in new commands. Partly because I am not all that familiar with working that way even though it is probably a MUCH better way of doing things.
Before we get to the code though, what is this for exactly?
If you use cloudflare as a protection and CDN layer for a website it works by acting as a reverse proxy for your site. I.E. client connects to your site by a cloudflare hosted DNS record… instead of connecting directly to your server, their connection terminates at Cloudflare, they do things, then the pass the connection along to your actual service. ‘Nuff said, google if you need more info.
In the case of an Azure Web App (or any other web server I supposed), the app is hosted/available on some public IP and/or azure domain name that azure provides when you create the app…
What this means is that someone can easily bypass your cloudflare layer (and the associated performance enhancements and protections like web application firewalls) if they know your source systems IP address and in the case of azure, your azure provided domain name for your app.
So what that means is that you need to setup an ACL (Access Control List) on your source system to say “Allow traffic from all Cloudflare IP ranges and block everyone else”.
Cloudflare has like 20 IP ranges… And setting up that ACL by hand on a web app in Azure is arduous at best. But that is why we have scripting… to make things that are generally a pain in the rear… NOT a pain in the rear. (more…)