Connect to Office 365 Exchange PowerShell
KB ID 0001410 Problem If there’s one thing thats grown on me it’s PowerShell, After the last few versions of Exchange you can’t really escape it. So now we have so many clients with their Exchange in Office 365. The ability to connect to that, and use all your usual Exchange commandlets is a bonus! WARNING: This process may end up with you getting an “Access is denied” error, if you are using modern...
Exchange Setup Error: Cannot Update Schema
KB ID 0001409 Problem I had a nightmare with this, (this morning). Client had an Exchange 2007 Server in a sub domain, and I am migrating them to Exchange 2016 (via Exchange 2013). While attempting to deploy the Exchange 2013 Server, the ‘Readiness Checks’ failed; Error: The Active Directory Schema isn’t up-to-date, and this user account isn’t a member of the ‘Schema Admins’ and/or ‘Enterprise...
VMware vSphere: Adding NFS Storage
KB ID 0001408 Problem If you have some NFS storage, and you want to use it as a Datastore in your VMware environment, this is the procedure to follow. Pre-Requisites I’m assuming you already have a network connection between your ESX servers and the NAS box, (i.e you have a VM Kernel NIC) on the same network. I’m also assuming you have the NFS setup correctly, in this example I’m using a Buffalo NAS box. But you can...
Migrating RD Web and RD Gateway Roles
KB ID 0001406 Problem I’ve got a job coming up to deploy some Duo two factor authentication into a clients RDS farm. To make things a bit easier for them I needed to migrate their RD Connection Broker. They had their Connection Broker, Gateway, and Web roles on one server, (which is not unusual, or incorrect). It turned out, that moving the Connection Broker, was going to be a major task, and it would be a lot easier to move the...
PowerShell – Getting Server IP Address Information
KB ID 0001404 Problem I’ve been rebuilding some Hyper-V hosts over the last few weeks, and one thing I learned rebuilding VMware ESX hosts is, ‘make sure you know what all the network cards are doing before you flatten it!’ The same is true of storage as well but here I’m just concentrating on networking. List Network Cards and MAC Addresses If you have these documented you can rename the network card correctly...
Exchange: PowerShell Commands
KB ID 0001405 Problem This might seem like an odd title for an article here at PNL? But I’m going to use this page as a place to put all the commands I’m sick of Googling for, and/or working out every time I do an Exchange job. So as with all the posts here, it’s here for my benefit, and if anyone else gets something from it great! Exchange General Change Exchange Licence Code Set-ExchangeServer -Identity Server-Name...
Windows ‘Always On’ VPN Part 2 (NPS, RAS, and Clients)
KB ID 0001403 Problem Back in Part One, we setup the AD (Groups,) and the Certificate services that will knit everything together. Now we need to configure an NPS server that acts as a RADIUS server for our remote clients, And a RAS Server that our remote clients will connect to. Step1: Network Setup Microsoft have an alarming habit of telling you to connect DMZ assets to the LAN. In their defence I’ve seen some documentation...
Remotely Log Users Off From CLI / PowerShell
KB ID 0001401 Problem I’ve not had to do this since the days we got “The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections” errors. Now thankfully Windows Server tells us who is logged on so we can ‘ask politely’ before we boot them off! Today though, my user session got all messed up, and I needed to kick ‘myself’ off remotely, (and have a fresh session.) Solution From a...
PowerShell: Creating Domains and Domain Controllers
KB ID 0001400 Problem I needed to spin up some Windows 2016 Servers, and a domain to do some testing. I have promoted hundreds maybe thousands of domain controllers, so I wondered if this time I could do it with PowerShell. It’s actually easier than using the GUI! Solution If you were doing this in Server Manager, you would have to add the role first, and PowerShell is no different; Install-WindowsFeature AD-Domain-Services...
Windows ‘Always On’ VPN Part 1 (Domain and PKI)
KB ID 0001399 Problem Always On VPN was a bit of a misnomer when it was released, as it was only really ‘on’ when a user logged on. So when comparing it with ‘Direct Access’ it didn’t have the capacity to ‘Manage Out’. With the release of Windows 10 (1709) this has been rectified with ‘Device Tunnels’, (more on that later). The solution uses RAS, NAP (NPS), and PKI (Certificate...