Sending email as an alias (proxy address) with Office 365

I must admit that it was a bit embarrassing to see my Administrator password expired when I tried to log in as Domain Admin to Domain Controller. I got this little message saying This user account’s password has expired. The password must change to logon. Please update the password or contact your system administrator or technical support.

FTPS and SFTP are two ways to send and receive files from remote sources. While the name suggests both do the same thing, those are different protocols, in the end, having the same goal. A few weeks back, I had to make sure I can reliably download files from FTPS server using PowerShell, and since I couldn’t find anything straightforward to use, I decided to write my own. Transfertto is a new PowerShell module that supports both FTPS and SFTP protocols. Its goal is to be the only module that you need to transfer files to and from FTP/SFTP servers.

Working with Office 365 is my bread and butter in the last few months. I’m a System Architect and I am dropped in multiple projects, both new and old, to fix certain aspect and get out before anyone sees me. One of the common tasks I get is to provide some data about users stored in Office 365.

The steps to integrate new Microsoft Exchange 2013 with SharePoint 2013 are fairly simple. You just need to follow Microsoft Configure…

Being a Microsoft MVP has quite a few benefits. You get to be part of unique offers that help you enhance your knowledge even further. Microsoft Learning team decided to provide free training on Microsoft Fundamentals for MVPs and the Microsoft community, so I’m sharing this with you! Starting next week, Microsoft will run each activity from 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) or 15:00 to 23:00 in Europe (CET).

Hosting your VM’s in Azure Cloud is excellent. You have all those features, professionally managed and virtually limitless. I don’t want to take your time to sell you Azure Services but to share a solution to one of the things I had to solve in Azure and sooner or later you may end up with on. During the test restore for Active Directory and multiple other machines which were much older (or newer) then Active Directory Domain Controller that was restored it turned out one can’t log in to most of the devices. First of all your domain password is already changed, but that can quickly be addressed. Your second and more significant problem is Network Level Authentication (NLA), and your 3rd problem is broken trust relationship.

A few days ago, I was asked to take a look at PowerShell Malware. While I don’t know much about malware, my curiosity didn’t let me skip on this occasion, and I was handed over WindowsPowerShell.evtx file. Ok, that’s not what I expected! I wanted PowerShell .ps1 files that I can read and assess? Well, you play with the cards you were dealt with. What I was handed over was PowerShell Event Log. PowerShell writes whatever you execute, and it thinks it is risky, to Windows PowerShell Operation Event Log.

I’ve been using Ubiquiti Unifi for some years now, for both home and work usage. It’s great hardware at a great price, and the best thing for a software maniac like me is that it’s continuously updated. Some time ago I upgraded Ubuntu to 18.04, and things went a bit sideways. You see Unifi started to add to their DEB packages that Mongo 3.6 is not supported and therefore blocking any installation. The idea is, it works perfectly fine on MongoDB 3.6 but migration between 3.4 to 3.6 is just not straightforward. Long story short when I upgraded Ubuntu I was suddenly greeted with not working Unifi.  I’ve fixed that, and blogged about it how you can do so using manual steps – Ubuntu 18.04 – Fixing Unifi .deb package to run with 3.6 MongoDB. The thing is with each new version out I have to do multiple steps to fix every single package from Unifi (you see where I’m going right?). While a few years ago I would be stuck to use bash or some other workaround which would be a pain for me, this is 2019, and PowerShell Core works excellent on Linux systems! I know that installing PowerShell Core for hardcore Linux fans may not be as fun as it is for me, but you do get a lot of benefits from it.

Christmas time is upon us, and I’ve decided that my PSTeams module needs some love. I wrote it in late 2018 and updated it a few times at the beginning of 2019. This release hopefully is worth of having 1.0 version number. I don’t do that often and usually go for build numbers changes only, but Microsoft Teams message cards have their limits on functionality. Therefore, there are not many things that can be added unless Microsoft opens up and gives us all the cool features of Adaptive Cards. PSTeams module uses Webconnector to send messages to Teams. That method only supports Message Cards, which even Microsoft calls Legacy. But legacy doesn’t mean fully functional with some cool features of their own. If you’re new to PSTeams you may want to read those 2 posts below to get information how to set it up.

I’ve been working on cleaning up Group Policies for a couple of months. While it may seem trivial, things get complicated when you’re tasked with managing 5000 GPOs created over 15 years by multiple teams without any best practices in mind. While working on GPOZaurr (my new PowerShell module), I’ve noticed that the more code I wrote to manage those GPOs, the more I knew passing this knowledge to admins who will be executing this on a weekly/monthly basis is going to be a challenge. That’s why I’ve decided to follow a similar approach as my other Active Directory testing module called Testimo. I’ve created a single command that analyses Group Policies using different methods and shows views from different angles to deliver the full picture. On top of that, it provides a solution (or it tries to) so that it’s fairly easy to fix – as long as you agree with what it proposes.