In the previous blog post I have showed you how to interactively log in into the Microsoft Graph API. You had to enter a username, a password, and you had to enter a second factor. This is typically not want you want if you want to automate things. But there is another way to get access to the Microsoft Graph API.
Create an app registration To get access, you have to register an app in your AzureAD.
There is a new API in town… naa, not really new, but the Microsoft Graph API will replace most, if not all, other Azure AD/ Microsoft 365 APIs. Actually, Microsoft has planned to retire Azure AD Graph API and ADAL in Juni 2022. Now they have postponed this date to somewhere after December 2022. This will give you some extra time to refactor your PowerShell scrips and move them to use the PowerShell SDK for Graph.
Using a password safe, or password management system, is not a best practice - it’s a common practice. I’m using KeePass for years, because it’s available for different platforms, it can be used offline, it is Open Source, and it is not bound to any cloud services. Keepass allows me securely store usernames, passwords, recovery codes etc. for different services and websites, and together with features like autotype, Keepass offers a plus security and convenience.
TL;DR: There’s a script at the bottom of the page that fixes the issue.
Some days ago, this HPE customer advisory caught my attention:
Advisory: (Revision) VMware - HPE ProLiant Gen8 Servers running VMware ESXi 5.5 Patch 10, VMware ESXi 6.0 Patch 4, Or VMware ESXi 6.5 May Experience Purple Screen Of Death (PSOD): LINT1 Motherboard Interrupt
And there is also a corrosponding VMware KB article:
ESXi host fails with intermittent NMI PSOD on HP ProLiant Gen8 servers
One of my personal predictions for 2017 is, that Microsoft Azure will gain more market share. Especially here in Germany. Because of this, I have started to refresh my knowledge about Azure. A nice side effect is that I can also improve my PowerShell skills.
Currently, the script creates a couple of VMs and resource groups. Nothing more, nothing less. The next features I want to add are:
add additional disks to the DCs (for SYSVOL and NTDS) promote both two servers to domain controllers change the DNS settings for the Azure vNetwork deploy a Windows 10 client VM I created a new repository on GitHub and shared a first v0.
The downside of using WordPress is that many people use it. That makes WordPress a perfect target for attacks. I have some trouble with attacks, and one of the consequences is, that my web server crashes under load. The easiest way to solve this issue would be to ban those IP addresses. I use Fail2ban to protect some other services. So the idea of using Fail2ban to ban IP addresses, that are used for attacks, was obvious.
Some days ago, my colleague Claudia and I started to work on a new project: A greenfield deployment consisting of some well known building blocks: HPE ProLiant, HPE MSA, HPE Networking (now Aruba) and VMware vSphere. Nothing new for us, because we did this a couple times together. But this led us to the idea, to automate some tasks. Especially the configuration of the HPE ProLiants: Changing BIOS settings and configuring the iLO.
Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are all the rage. REST was defined by Roy Thomas Fielding in his PhD dissertation “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures". The architectural style of REST describes six constraints:
Uniform interface Stateless Cacheable Client - Server communication Layered system Code on demand RESTful APIs typically use HTTP and HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) to send data to, or retrieve data from remote systems.
Manually assigning ports to VLANs can be a time consuming and error prone process. Depending on the size of the network, there is a point where it doesn’t make sense to do this manually. Especially in SMB networks, VLANs are assigned manually, because the effort of automating the VLAN assignment exceeds the effort for manually assigning VLANs. Those environments are often very static. I know many SMB networks where VLAN have not been addressed for a long time.
In December 2013, VMware made an christmas gift to the community by releasing pyVmomi. pyVmomi is a SDK that allows you to manage VMware ESXi and vCenter using Python and the VMware vSphere API. Nearly 18 months are past since then and pyVmomi has developed over time.
I’ve started to play around with Python, and I’ve written about the reasons in one of my last blog posts (Hey infrastructure guy, you should learn Python!
