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November 18, 2023bytheDXT

By default, Windows servers display lots of details when you logon to them and rarely leave you wondering what it’s doing. A while back I ran into an issue that was causing 15 minute login times when a user would log in to the computer for the first time. This was particularly a problem with shared systems like meeting room computers as many users may have never logged into that computer before. The problem scales with the more meeting rooms you have and the more users you have, and typically people are rushing for meetings and don’t have time to wait for a long Windows login process.

From the user’s perspective, it looks like the computer would just sit at Welcome for 15 minutes. Yes, you can go dig into the event logs and see what’s causing that or you could make it so the computer can output what it’s doing, making it so the users can provide you with more useful information.

To do this you need to enable verbose statuses. This is enabled by default on Windows servers but not regular Windows devices. When a regular Windows device logins in and sits at the Welcome message it is doing stuff but not telling you what it’s doing.

In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to enable the Windows verbose login status with a GPO or Intune.

The Process

GPO

Make a new GPO
Go to Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System

Set Display highly detailed status messages to Enabled.

Link the GPO to the OU of the devices you want to enable Verbose Status on.

Intune

Login to Microsoft Intune admin center.
Click on Devices

Click on Configuration profiles

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Installing

To get started with Microsoft Graph we first need to install it.

Open PowerShell as Admin

Install Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK by running the command Install-Module Microsoft.Graph

Connecting

Now that the Microsoft Graph is installed we can connect to a Microsoft 365 tenant.

Run the following PowerShell command to connect to a Microsoft 365 tenant Connect-MgGraph

Login with a Global Admin account.

You will now see a screen that lists the permissions that Microsoft Graph needs to function.

Select Consent on behalf of your organization and click Accept

It is normal that the Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools shows up as unverified, there is a long-standing issue on GitHub about it. You can read more about Issue #482 on GitHub.

Now you are connected to the Microsoft 365 tenant and can run Microsoft Graph cmdlets.

How it works

I got curious about why the application permissions are needed and what is happening. Here’s what I found out.

When you click Accept it creates an enterprise application in Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) named Microsoft Graph Command Line Tools and has an Application ID of 14d82eec-204b-4c2f-b7e8-296a70dab67e and grants the app delegate permission to the permissions that were listed. By selecting Consent on behalf of your organization allows the app to not have to ask for the permissions every time you use it.

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Azure AD Entra ID How To Microsoft Microsoft 365 Microsoft Graph Office 365 PowerShell

November 4, 2023bytheDXT

A while back I saw someone’s computer that had a company logo in the Windows taskbar; it looked super slick. I wanted to duplicate the same thing in my setup.

The documentation on what causes a company logo to show up in the search box in the Windows taskbar and the Windows start menu is kind of lacking however, after playing around I figured it out. It’s the custom default theme in Microsoft 365 that will cause the organization logo to show up on Windows devices connected to a Microsoft 365 tenant be it joined or just registered devices.

Before and after adding the company logo branding

In this post, I will show step-by-step how to add a custom default theme to your Microsoft 365 tenant that will also apply to the search box in the taskbar of Windows devices. This works on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

The Process

Login to the Microsoft 365 admin center
Click on Settings > Org settings

Click Organization profile

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IT

Customize EUC How To Microsoft Microsoft 365 Office 365 Taskbar Windows Windows 10 Windows 11

October 28, 2023bytheDXT

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a way to help validate the authenticity of the emails you send.

DKIM adds a signature to your email by using a private key and a public key. Your public key is your DKIM DNS record and only your email server knows your private key. When you have DKIM setup every email you send gets signed with DKIM.

A DKIM signature is built from the hashed values of some of the email headers, one of which is the hash of the email body itself. With the hashed value of the email headers, DKIM encrypts it by using a private key and a public key and adds the encrypted result to the email as a DKIM header signature. This is similar to how PGP works. If you want to know more about PGP you can read more in my post about PGP.

When the recipient receives an email that was signed with DKIM, the recipient’s email server can validate that the email hasn’t been tampered with by decrypting the DKIM header signature using the sender’s public key. If the message was altered the DKIM header signature wouldn’t exist or the decrypted result wouldn’t match.

In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to enable DKIM on a Microsoft 365 tenant by using the GUI and PowerShell.

GUI Way

Login to Microsoft 365 admin center
Click on Security

Click on Policies & rules

Click on Threat policies

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IT

Customize Encryption Exchange Online Hardening How To Microsoft Microsoft 365 Office 365 PowerShell security

October 21, 2023bytheDXT

I’m a big fan of using copy paste as it helps me reduce typos and allows me to paste links or other information quickly between systems. Previously I wrote a post that covers how to enable copy paste with VMRC (VMware Remote Console) however that’s not super useful for the users that are using Omnissa Horizon (formerly VMware Horizon). If you want to know how to enable copy paste with VMRC you can read my post about it called VMware Copy Paste Enabler.

The default configuration of VMware Horizon is that copy paste only works in one direction. You can paste items into VMware Horizon but you can’t copy items out, from an end-user perspective they may report that as broken. Thankfully there’s an easy way to enable full copy paste in both directions in Omnissa Horizon.

In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to enable copy paste in both directions in VMware Horizon.

Perquisites

Have the Horizon GPO templates deployed to your Central Store.

Here’s how to deploy the VMware Horizon GPO Templates.

The Process

Create a new GPO.
Go to Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > VMware View Agent Configuration > Clipboard Redirection

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Active Directory EUC GPO How To Omnissa Omnissa Horizon VMware VMware Horizon

October 14, 2023bytheDXT

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has been around for a long time. PGP is a system that allows you to encrypt a message using a key pair. A key pair consists of a public key and a private key. The public and private key pair are created at the same time and are permanently linked; one can not work without the other.

The basics of PGP are that the private key has a passphrase on it that only the creator knows. When you encrypt a message with PGP you encrypt it with your private key and a public key you specify, be that your public key or someone else’s public key. This makes it so the PGP encrypted message can only be decrypted using the public key you specified.

Here is a step-by-step example of using PGP.

Setup

For this example I will use an online PGP Tool.

First we need to generate our key pair to get our public and private key.

Fill in the options and click Generate keys

Download the public and private key.

Below is my full PGP public key for this example.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: Keybase OpenPGP v2.0.76
Comment: https://keybase.io/crypto
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=vnvb
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Code language: plaintext (plaintext)

Encrypting

Now lets encrypt a message.

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Update

The process detailed below works perfectly on Windows 11 however, on Windows 10 the process below will lock the Start Menu layout preventing users from being able to pin anything to the Windows 10 Start Menu or change anything in the Start Menu. The process to fix this is to also deploy a default Windows 10 Start Menu the process for the fix is detailed in my post Intune Deploy Windows 10 Default Start Menu.

Deploying the same taskbar to all users is a very nice quality of life improvement, as it can help eliminate the problems of users using Windows Mail instead of the already installed Microsoft Outlook.

I opted to deploy a standard default taskbar using Microsoft Intune as Microsoft Office is a required application on all Intune systems in my setup so I didn’t need to worry about a system trying to pin Microsoft Outlook when it wasn’t installed.

In this post, I’ll show you step-by-step how to create the taskbar XML file and how to deploy it to Windows 10 and Windows 11 using Microsoft Intune.

Create the XML

Copy the example taskbar XML below or copy it from Microsoft here.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LayoutModificationTemplate
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/LayoutModification"
    xmlns:defaultlayout="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/FullDefaultLayout"
    xmlns:start="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/StartLayout"
    xmlns:taskbar="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Start/2014/TaskbarLayout"
    Version="1">
  <CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection>
    <defaultlayout:TaskbarLayout>
      <taskbar:TaskbarPinList>
        <taskbar:UWA AppUserModelID="Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe!MicrosoftEdge" />
        <taskbar:DesktopApp DesktopApplicationLinkPath="%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\System Tools\File Explorer.lnk" />
      </taskbar:TaskbarPinList>
    </defaultlayout:TaskbarLayout>
 </CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection>
</LayoutModificationTemplate>
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

We will need to make some changes as it isn’t perfect. We will start by telling Windows to unpin all the default pinned apps.

To remove all the default pinned apps we need to change <CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection> to be <CustomTaskbarLayoutCollection PinListPlacement="Replace">

Even though we configure the taskbar XML to replace the default pinned apps this has no impact on the apps the user has pinned, it may move the items to the start of the taskbar if they have them pinned further down but that’s it.

Now we can start adding the pinned apps we want. I like to have Edge, File Explorer, and Outlook pinned.

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IT

Customize EUC How To Intune Microsoft Microsoft Endpoint Manager Taskbar Windows

September 23, 2023bytheDXT

Back in 2015, Microsoft enabled all Microsoft 365 (aka Office 365) Exchange Online tenants the ability to change their message sizes to a maximum size of 150 MB. Originally the default size was 25 MB and previously Microsoft increased that to 35 MB, your tenant will likely be set to one of those values.

The new 150 MB message size limit is not enabled by default you must enable it. In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to change the message size limit in Exchange Online for all existing mailboxes and all new mailboxes.

Prerequisites

Microsoft 365 Customizations needs to be enabled. If you don’t know how to do that my post Microsoft 365 Enable Organization Customization shows you how.

The Process

Connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell
Run the following PowerShell command to see what the current message size limit is Get-Mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited | Format-List displayname,MaxSendSize,MaxReceiveSize

Run the following PowerShell command to set all existing mailboxes to 150 MB Get-Mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -MaxReceiveSize 150MB -MaxSendSize 150MB

Increasing the message size limit

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IT

Customize Exchange Online How To Microsoft Microsoft 365 Office 365 PowerShell

September 16, 2023bytheDXT

I’m a fan of doing as much as possible with CLI. It always feels more complete and can sometimes be automated. In this post, I will detail step-by-step how to upgrade the firmware image on an Aruba AP (Access Point) with CLI.

ArubaOS is also called Aruba Instant and has nothing to do with Aruba Instant On as that is another product line that is cloud-managed but not cloud-managed with Aruba Central. I’ll be using the term ArubaOS (AOS) in this post to try and keep things as clear as possible.

If you upgrade to AOS 10 you will need to manage the APs with Aruba Central. AOS 8 is the last and still currently developed version that does not require Aruba Central. You can confirm that AOS 8 is still being developed and maintained by checking the Aruba End of Life page for AOS 8.

The Process

Review the release notes for the version of AOS you want to upgrade to. Specifically the section Supported Hardware Platforms as that will help you determine your upgrade path.
SSH into the Virtual Controller

If you have more than on AP in your VC (Virtual Controller) you need to define one of them as the preferred conductor. When a preferred conductor is set that will always be the AP running the VC.

Run the command show ap-env to see if you have preferred conductor.

If the output doesn’t show iap_conductor:1 then you currently don’t have a preferred conductor. (If your firmware is really old it might show up as iap_master:1 as that was the old name for it.)

Run the command iap-conductor to set the AP that is currently running the VC to be the preferred conductor. (If your firmware is really old the command won’t be recognized and you’ll need to run the command iap-master instead.)

Running the iap-conductor command

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IT

Aruba Firmware How To HPE Networking Update Upgrade WiFi

Latest posts

Windows Verbose Status

The Process