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On Connect Woes & Broken AD Links
I woke up this morning to an email that read: Password Hash Synchronization heartbeat was skipped in last 120 minutes. While this happens for no apparent reason from time to time, I logged in four hours after the email came in and noticed the issue had not been resolved. I went to log into my…
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It’s Not Too Late… Yet.
One of the things I always tell my students is that it is much easier to build security into your IT infrastructure if you do it from the planning phase, and not as an afterthought. I read a great quote recently: The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the next best…
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How Could You Let That Happen?
A close friend of mine, an elderly gentleman from the old country (in every way), is going through a terrible time right now. Part of his struggles includes (a known) someone hacking into his email account. When he asked me ‘…why can’t I just hack into the account to take it back?’ I had to…
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End of Days
In the IT field there are a number of different names for it. CompTIA seems to use two terms: End of Life (EOL) denotes that a product is no longer available for purchase, and End of Service Life (EOSL) means that it is no longer supported by the vendor. Microsoft uses the term End of…
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You May Be Exposed… Deservedly!
I received this email this week: Let me be clear: these emails are quite important, and you should be paying close attention to them. With that said, this particular exposure was from nearly five years ago. If you have a password that is that old then maybe you deserve to be compromised? With multifactor authentication…
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Not a Security Person…
I was approached about a job recently by a company I have worked with in the past. While speaking with the recruiter he told me that one aspect of the position was Identity and Access Management (IAM). He then told me that the client had specifically told him that “This job is NOT related to…
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Certified in Cybersecurity
I have been security-minded for most of my adult life. Whether or not I have always lived it is another matter, but I have learned my lessons and have done my best to continually improve. While I have been taking IT certification courses and exams for nearly twenty-five years, it was only in 2022 that…
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Goodbye to an Era
In the days after the demise of cassette tapes and before MP3s existed there were basically two ways get your music legally: You could listen to the radio of course… but the vast majority of people purchased it on Compact Disc (CDs). Tower Records reigned supreme but there were many other places to purchase them……
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Security Copilot: WARNING!
I have been a technology blogger since 2002. I could not possibly go back to count, but I would not be surprised if I have written over a thousand articles on or around Microsoft products, technologies, events, and solutions. Whether you have read one or two, or all of them, I can guarantee you that…
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Domain vs. Entra… or both?
This will be the first of a multi-part series on configuring and managing device Identity and Access Management (IAM) for Microsoft In the year 2000, Windows 2000 Server was released, and with it came a new era of authentication. Microsoft introduced Active Directory to the world, which would later be known as Active Directory Domain…
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Entra ID Connect: Starting Over
Because I do not always run my demo environments following industry best practices, I occationally find myself in a situation where things might be… horked. That is to say, my on-prem lab (including the Active Directory domain) gets wiped, and I rebuild it from scratch. It is something that I usually enjoy doing, and until…
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Do The Right Thing…
While I have been using and learning computers since 1979, by my own definition I only became a real IT Professional when I passed my first certification exam in 2003. At that time I was already aware of a lot of people in the business who were… less than reputable. When I went out on…
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Not Passing and Failing
I maintain a spreadsheet that lists every single certification exam that I have sat since my first one in December of 2001. Each line consists of the date, the exam title, the exam code, the result, and the certification that it was applicable to (since many certifications, especially in those early days, required multiple exams…
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Words Matter
There are some things people say that I look at them and think to myself ‘that was completely insensitive’ or ‘you could have said that in a less hurtful way.’ On the other side of that, I believe that in this day and age people get offended far too easily, and that getting angry because…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
