Another post with notes from my former to my future self.

What was I trying to do?

We had to wire up a firewall configuration policy for a group of computers so that they'd be prevented from accessing the internet. Ok, no problem, except that our email comes from Office 365 which happens to be on the internet. …

The problem to solve...

Every so often, I need to automate something. Duh. Today, I would like to manage the group memberships of some Azure AD users. This doesn't require any local resources so there's no reason to run this on-premise. There's also no need to store credentials in the script - that's what managed …

A while back, scrolling through YouTube, I stumbled across a video titled "High Availability Pi-Hole? Yes Please!", which I thought was interesting - it seemed to address a problem that I didn't really think I had.. but why not poke around at it?

Pi-Hole is a network-wide ad blocking DNS server. It can …

One more issue to solve...

We have one domain controller at work that is kinda critical to the entire operation. I mean, not like this particular server is the only AD server on the site, but it somehow became only LDAPS server responsible for authentication for non-AD enabled services.

Like VPN. Like our ERP.

So when …

More on the host configuration

In my last post on this topic, I had left a to-do to get LetsEncrypt setup and running on the host.

After spending quite a bit of time on the effort and learning what tools were at my disposal, I figured out (pretty late in the process) that.. my initial approach had a considerable flaw: …

Backstory

I think just about everyone of my posts I start with some sort of justification why I'm writing the post. I don't really know why .. other than I think it serves as a good reminder of what I was doing when I wrote the darned post ...

As usual, these things start off at work.

We had a bit of a security audit …

Some of my notes on how we used PowerApps to solve some COVID problems at work

I should have done this sooner, because I'm not likely to remember all the details too much. This won't be a "technology post" so much, or even a how-to - maybe more a reminder of the tools we used to solve the problems we ran into …

And just like that, all my base are belong to Cloudflare.

It started with DNS ...

It started out pretty simply: Cloudflare offered front-end caching for your website, provided you ran your DNS through them. They would proxy the connections for me, provide SSL (through Lets Encrypt), and I could still update DNS through …

Maps on portable devices

Getting working maps on a mobile device is reasonably straightforward, especially if you're able to be connected to a cellular service.

The challenge starts to increase when you may not have connectivity, or have limited bandwidth or speed on your device. Offline maps within tools like Google …

Say what now?

Sure, MS, VirusTotal really is a nefarious site that you should prevent me from going to.

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