This is only a short blog post to document a solution for a very annoying problem. After the automatic update of my Outlook to the latest Office 365 build (version 1809), it has started to prompting for credentials. I’m using Outlook to access a Microsoft Exchange 2016 server (on-premises), without any hybrid configuration. A pretty simple and plain Exchange 2016 on-prem deployment.
I knew, that it has to be related to Office 365, because the Outlook 2016 on my PC at the office was not affected.
It is common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and now Vembu has published Vembu BDR Essentials.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss.
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.
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.
Some days ago, I have implemented one-time passwords (OTP) for NetScaler Gateway for one of my customers. This feature was added with NetScaler 12, and it’s a great way to secure NetScaler Gateway with a native NetScaler feature. Native OTP does not need any third party servers. But you need a NetScaler Enterprise license, because nFactor Authentication is a requirement.
To setup NetScaler native OTP, I followed the availbe guides on the internet.
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.
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
Many blog posts have been written about the two biggest security vulnerabilities discovered so far.
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.
