This is a summary of a great session by Mark Russinovich talking about Azure Inside Azure Datacenters Data center design When Microsoft plans new data centers they start with geographies (Geos) which are gradually coming down to country (Germany, France, UK, etc). Within a geo there are at least two regions (region pair). A region […]
OneDrive – Files on Demand
Window 1709 (Fall Creators) has a great new feature called Files on Demand. It is a OneDrive feature that we actually talked to Microsoft about at Ignite in 2015. Basically it makes OneDrive more like other file syncing tools, where the file names and directory structure is always shown but the file content may or […]
Sysmon Configuration with DSC
As part of a project I’m working on I was asked to install and configure Sysmon on all servers using DSC (Azure Automation DSC in this case) After a bit of effort I came up with the following Configuration xSysmon { param ( [string] $SourcePath = “”, [string] $LocalPath = “”, [string] $ConfigFileName = […]
Azure Automation DSC Composite Configurations
While working on DSC for a client I came across the need to use Composite Configurations, however it needed to work with Azure Automation. Microsoft did use to say that Azure Automation DSC does not support partial or composite configurations, however composite ones can actually be wrapped up as a module and imported. After that […]
Allowing # and & in OneDrive for Business
At Microsoft Ignite 2017 they mentioned that OneDrive does now allow # (hash) and & (ampersand) but it needs to be configured on the tenant. If your current setting is NoPreference meaning Microsoft will roll it out when it feels like it. If you want these characters accepted earlier then it can be set with […]
Nero Blanco – Gold Cloud Platform
At Ignite this year Nero Blanco has reached another milestone in achieving Gold Cloud Platform status with Microsoft! Thanks to all of those customers that we do Azure work for today, and for all of you who want to but haven’t spoken to us yet 🙂
Nero Blanco – Silver Cloud Platform
Nero Blanco has reached another milestone in achieving Silver Cloud Platform status with Microsoft! Thanks to all of those customers that we do Azure work for today, and for all of you who want to but haven’t spoken to us yet 🙂
Microsoft 365
Microsoft recently released a new subscription called Microsoft 365. It is available in Business, Enterprise E3 and Enterprise E5 variants. The Microsoft 365 Business is effectively Office 365 Business Premium, EMS (simplified for Business) and Windows 10. The Enterprise variants add more configurable options and deeper insight. So why would you want to buy a […]
Get all possible AD Attributes for User or Group
I recently had to work out what the full set of attributes was that could be set against a user or a group in Active Directory. My first thought was ok why not just grab a user in PowerShell and ask to see all properties Get-ADUser -ResultSizeLimit 1 -Filter * -Properties * However that only […]
Office 365 new Inactive Mailbox Licenses
Important: Microsoft has decided not to go ahead with the plan. One of the advantages of gathering at Ignite is the chance to have some in-depth conversations about topics. Microsoft was gracious enough to understand that they need to do some more work to understand how tenants use inactive mailboxes before they should introduce new […]
Windows Server 2016: Access Denied for Admin Shares
We recently had an issue that started of with a problem promoting some domain controllers in Azure. We’d set up the site to site VPN and wanted to stretch the Forest into Azure. It seemed like a simple plan… Problems arose when we promoted the domain controller with errors such as System log: Can’t process […]
The Banker Technology Projects of the Year Awards 2017
Did you know, Nero Blanco has a long-lasting relationship with HPe (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), BT (Binary Tree) & HSBC? For the last 4 years we have been the leading technology consultancy, developing and customising the back bone of the migration and coexistence environment for HSBC’s 300,000 mailboxes. From the pilot stage of the Mercury programme […]