Microsoft

This is just a short, but interesting blog post. When you have to troubleshoot authentication failures in a network that uses Windows Network Policy Server (NPS), the Windows event log is absolutely indispensable. The event log offers everything you need. The success and failure event log entries include all necessary information to get you back on track. If failure events would be logged…

Today, I was playing with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OmniSwitches and Access Guardian in my lab. Access Guardian refers to the some OmniSwitch security functions that work together to provide a dynamic, proactive network security solution:

In 2014, Microsoft announced the Azure Preview Portal, which was going GA in December 2015. Since January 8, 2018, the classic Azure Portal is turned off. The “Preview Portal” was more than a facelift. The classic Azure Portal was based on the Service Management mode, often called the “classic deployment model”, whereas the new Azure Portal uses the Resource Manager model. Azure Service Management (ASM) and Azure Resource Management are both deployment models. The Resource Manager model eases the deployment of complex setups by using templates to deploy, update and manage resources within a resource group as a single operation.

On January 18, 2018, Microsoft has published KB4074871 which has the title “Exchange Server guidance to protect against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities”. As you might guess, Exchange is affected by Meltdown & Spectre - like any other software. Microsoft explains in KB4074871:

Because these are hardware-level attacks that target x64-based and x86-based processor systems, all supported versions of Microsoft Exchange Server are affected by this issue.

Like Citrix, Microsoft does not offer any updates to address this issue, because there is nothing to fix in Microsoft Exchange. Instead of this, Microsoft recommends to run the lates Exchange Server cumulative update and any required security updates. On top, Microsoft recommends to check software before it is deployed into production. If Exchange is running in a VM, Microsoft recommends to follow the instructions offered by the cloud or hypervisor vendor.

Change History

01-13-2018: Added information regarding VMSA-2018-0004 01-13-2018: HPE has pulled Gen8 and Gen9 system ROMs 01-13-2018: VMware has updated KB52345 due to issues with Intel microcode updates 01-18-2018: Updated VMware section 01-24-2018: Updated HPE section 01-28-2018: Updated Windows Client and Server section 02-08-2018: Updated VMware and HPE section 02-20-2018: Updated HPE section 04-17-2018: Updated HPE section

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Many blog posts have been written about the two biggest security vulnerabilities discovered so far. In fact, we are talking about three different vulnerabilities:

Yesterday, a customer called me and told me about a scary observation on one of his Exchange 2016 DAG (Database Availability Groups) nodes.

In preparation of a security check, my customer created a snapshot of a Exchange 2016 DAG node. This node is part of a two node Windows Server 2012 R2/ Exchange 2016 CU7 cluster.

That something went wrong was instantly clear, after the first alarm messages were received. My customer opened a console windows and saw, that the VM was booting.

As part of a bigger Microsoft Exchange migration, one of my customers moved the in- and outbound mailflow to a newly installed mail relay cluster. We modified MX records to move the mailflow to the new mail relay, because the customer also switched the ISP. While changing the MX records for ~40 domains, and therefore more and more mails received through the new mail relay cluster, we noticed events from MSExchangeTransport (event id 1021):

Microsoft two different logins for their services:

• Microsoft Account (former Live ID)
• work or school account (Azure AD)

Both are located in different directories. The Microsoft account is located in another user database at Microsoft, as a work or school account. Latter are located in a Azure AD, which is associated with a customer. Both account types are identified using the email address. Microsoft accounts are used for service like Skype, OneDrive, but also for the Microsoft Certified Professional portal. Work or school accounts are mainly used for Office 365 and Azure.

In the last months I came across several customers that were in the process to evaluate, or to deploy Office 365. It usually started with a Office 365 trial, that some of the IT guys started to play around with. Weeks or months later, during the proof-of-concept or during the final deployment, the customer had to choose a Office 365 tenant name. That is the part before .onmicrosoft.com.

Update

On November 22, 2017, Ajay Patel (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware) published a blog post in reaction to Microsofts announcement (VMware – The Platform of Choice in the Cloud). Especially these statements are interesting:

No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.

Last month, I wrote about a very annoying issue, that I discovered during a Windows 10 VDI deployment: Roaming of the AppData\Local folder breaks the Start Menu of Windows 10 Enterprise (Roaming of AppData\Local breaks Windows 10 Start Menu). During research, I stumbled over dozens of threads about this issue.

Today, after hours and hours of testing, troubleshooting and reading, I might have found a solution.

The environment

Currently I don’t know if this is a workaround, a weird hack, or no solution at all. Maybe it was luck that none of my 2074203423 logins at different linked-clones resulted in a broken start menu. The customer is running: