Everything in AD (Active Directory) has a Distinguished Name. A Distinguished Name can be used in many situations such as setting up an application to use a service account or adding AD groups or users into applications and so much more. A Distinguished Name is also known as a DN. A benefit of an using…
For whatever reason the default fresh setup of Microsoft 365 has no audit logging turned on. Audit logging is very useful for IT troubleshooting and auditors love logs. Microsoft says that it is enabled by default for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 enterprise organizations. I suspect that means only if you have E1 or higher.…
The default setup of Windows Active Directory is no central store. A central store is a central place to store your group policy definitions. If you only have one domain controller and make all your GPOs (Group Policy Objects) on that domain controller this likely wouldn’t be much of a problem. The limitations start to…
Recently I needed to expand a disk on a Windows 10 VM and a Windows Server 2022 VM, but I couldn’t because the Recovery Partition was in the way. When searching for a way to do this I discovered that the internet is full of posts about simply deleting the Windows Recovery Partition. I am…
Right out of the box the initial configuration of Microsoft 365 (aka Office 365) isn’t bad, but there’s a lot more you can do to harden it and to make it fully yours. By default all Microsoft 365 tenants are in a state that is called dehydrated. Microsoft places all the tenants in this state…
When you are managing devices with Microsoft Intune aka Microsoft Endpoint Manager it’s great to control BitLocker but silently enabling BitLocker for all devices is even better. Here is everything you need to know to silently enable BitLocker with Intune. Disk Encryption Policy Profile First up we need to create a disk encryption policy profile…
Intune aka Microsoft Endpoint Manager can be extremely powerful but as it always goes with great power comes great responsibility. To make sure I’m only targeting the devices I want, I like to make a few dynamic device groups that I’ll use for various Intune policy targeting. The dynamic device groups I create are: By…
Recently I’ve ran into an issue with Microsoft Teams where the user sees a blocking message that says “Teams needs an update”. The user needs to action it before they can use Microsoft Teams again. Typically the user can just click on Update Teams which will take them to a download page for Microsoft Teams,…
I recently ran into an issue where an install of Azure AD Connect failed to start. It seems like the root cause was due to the SQLLocalDB Model database becoming corrupt, which caused it to fail at upgrading itself. This is a known issue in versions older than 2.1.1.0 of Azure AD Connect. While looking…
When you install Windows it always creates a Recovery Partition, which runs a very lite version of Windows with a few tools. There’s been a few times where I’ve used those tools to fix a system. I wanted to know what would happen if I deleted the Recovery Partition. This is what I found down…
