by ezs | May 9, 2023 | evilzenscientist
Back in a previous life I worked closely with colleagues working on the integration of Dell, HPE and other server hardware vendors into the Microsoft infrastructure management tooling from System Center.
I’m a year in to using Windows Admin Center and the integration with Dell OpenManage and the Dell iDRAC.
It’s (usually) a joy; as part of the patching cycle, open the Dell OpenManage integration blade in Windows Admin Center, check for compliance, see which components need updating, update them.
by ezs | Apr 24, 2023 | evilzenscientist
Four re-certifications in the last few days.
I really like the Microsoft model – free to re-certify, keep up to date on the latest areas of technology.
AZ-104, AZ-700, AZ-400, AZ-500 all current again.
If you’re about to re-sit these my top tips: read the exam subject matter, see what changed since you took the last test. Microsoft Learn has training, documentation and guidance – https://learn.microsoft.com – and you can also revisit learning resources such as John Savills Technical Training.
Open book test, 45 minutes. Bing is your friend.
by ezs | Apr 16, 2023 | evilzenscientist
Tiny piece of housekeeping, note for self for future use.
Previous reservations are wedged in the DHCP database, and not accessible through the DHCP MMS snap-in. Scope reconciliation shows the rogue entries.
Solution is to delete the reservations from the DHCP database.
Show all DHCP clients, i.e active leases and reservations
NETSH DHCP SERVER SCOPE [scope] SHOW CLIENTS
Remove individual, expired reservations
NETSH DHCP SERVER SCOPE [scope] DELETE LEASE [IP ADDRESS]
I could have done this with PowerShell, but NETSH was fast and easy.
by ezs | Mar 10, 2023 | evilzenscientist
I’ve had a Microsoft Flow connector in production for a long time. It runs twice daily, reads the weather forecast for my location (Issaquah, WA), and if it’s forecast to be warm, sends an email to remind that plants need watering.
At some point recently, the flow stopped working correctly. It was triggering for Fahrenheit temperatures rather than Celsius. Cue twice daily emails when it’s cold outside.
I pulled apart the flow – and the Inputs for the connector had changed:
by ezs | Jan 15, 2023 | evilzenscientist
Note for myself – remember to switch the UEFI template to Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority to allow booting from the ISO.
by ezs | Jan 13, 2023 | evilzenscientist
Deep joy working with Azure Function apps, and using timer triggers this last few weeks.
I’ve been working on a set of Azure Functions that fire on a schedule, to read information from across the Azure environment, and write the results to Cosmos DB. Simple enough.
The trigger is set as a Timer:
The timer takes an NCRONTAB format for when it fires.
The various pieces of documentation are pretty clear, and I’ve got a lot of familiarity with CRON running on Linux.
My initial schedule was 0 0 */8 * * * – which should fire every 8 hours.
Instead – some really variable and unreliable results. I found "8-ish" hours between triggers to be best case, often the whole function stopped firing. Restart the function, and "8-ish hours" later it fired.
After a bunch of reading and testing, I changed the schedule to 0 0 0/8 * * * – which fires at 00Z, 08Z, 16Z – so every 8 hours, but locked to midnight, 8.00am and 4.00pm UTC.
So far – so good.
This was a good NCRONTAB expression tester: NCrontab Online Expression Tester Evaluator (swimburger.net)
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