If you didn’t notice yesterday (July 18, 2024), the Azure US Central region had a pretty major outage where a good portion of the services in that region for a number of customers were not available. The outage was even bad enough that in the communications that Microsoft sent out about the incident they even recommended activating your disaster recovery plans. Needless to say, this was a pretty bad outage. Various companies were affected by this outage as they were hosted in US Central and only US Central. Some of DCAC’s services, like this website, were impacted by this outage. In our case ..read more

The team of Microsoft MVPs at DCAC can all report that they were rewarded the Microsoft MVP Award by Microsoft yesterday when Microsoft announced the awardees on July 10th, 2024. Like in prior years, our team has 5 Microsoft MVPs who are awarded in 6 Microsoft MVP Award Categories. All 5 of our MVPs received Microsoft MVP Awards in the Data Platform award category, and Denny received an award for the Microsoft Cloud Platform award category. Our team of Microsoft MVPs (Denny, Joey, Monica, John, and Meagan) spends a lot of personal time working on community activities, and DCAC is proud to sup ..read more

One of the great features of running Windows 2022 Virtual Machines (VMs) in Azure is that you can log into them using Entra ID (Azure Active Directory). However, if you deploy a new VM and simply try to log into that VM with the Remote Desktop application (RDP), you’ll be presented with the error message from RDP which says, “The Target Identifier in the Request was not Found in the Tenant”. Thankfully this error message is easy enough to fix, but there are a few steps that you’ll need to take. Fix DNS The first step is to add the machine to DNS. If your VM has a Public IP Address (I don’t re ..read more

Today, World AIDS Day, DCAC is launching its annual matching funds campaign on behalf of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF). Since 2018, we’ve raised more than $70,000 to support an AIDS-free generation. And there’s still work to do. That’s why DCAC has again pledged to match up to $10,000 in your donations!   It’s easy to participate! From December 1-24. Every dollar you donate to EGPAF gets doubled by DCAC. Donate more, and DCAC donates more…up to $10,000! For 35 years, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation has led the charge to prioritize children in ..read more

Recently, I upgraded our core Azure SQL Database for MySQL Single Server to Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server. The migration was pretty straight forward and I simply did an export with mysqldump and then an import with MySQL. The problem came up when I tried to use Power BI (PBI) and connect to to the Azure SQL Database for MySQL Flex Server instead. When I tried to connect PBI to the Flex server I kept getting “The given key was not present in the dictionary”. After a ton of searching, and some troubleshooting tips from two differing Microsoft Data Platform MVPs (who both know WAY mor ..read more

If you are a user of Microsoft Azure, there is a breaking change coming. There is good news about this change and bad news. Bad News First, the bad news is that this is a breaking change that requires some changes to your Azure environment. The change is that unless you have a specific method of getting Internet access, such as one of the following, the Virtual Machine(s) will lose Internet Access. Those options are: Azure NAT gateway Azure Load Balancer outbound rules Public IP address attached to the VM If you have one of those three configurations within your Azure environment, there’s n ..read more

If you don’t subscribe to DCAC’s Newsletter, DCAC recently moved our website from App Service for Windows to App Service for Linux in Azure. As part of our move to Linux, we moved to the Azure WordPress on App Service feature so that we could take advantage of the WordPress-specific improvements that Microsoft had made for the WordPress for App Service feature. One of the things we had to do manually, which we could do in Windows, was set up a Disaster Recovery configuration between two App Services. In the Windows world, we had extensions, one of which could replicate file changes from one ap ..read more

While moving a WordPress website to the WordPress on App Service recently, I ran into an error message being displayed in the Log steam within the Azure portal. That error message looked basically like this: 2024-04-11T00:10:40.437443394Z: [ERROR] 2024/04/11 00:10:40 [error] 968#968: *3123 upstream sent too big header while reading response header from upstream, client: 169.254.129.1, server: _, request: "POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php/php-fpm.sock:", host: "{site}", referrer: https://{site}/ The fix for this is to edit the config file for th ..read more

Microsoft Azure has a great feature within it called Private Endpoints. With Private Endpoints, you can connect to the Platform as a Service. The Private Endpoint is configured to use a private IP Address instead of routing your connection over the public Internet. This then lets you disable the public endpoint, closing the service off from the public Internet completely. There’s a little work that sometimes needs to be done with Private DNS zones to make everything function correctly, and everything will work great using Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, or just about any other w ..read more

Recently Google Drive had a problem where a lot of users lost a lot of data, and they had to resort to using very old snapshots of the data to recover the missing files. Because of this, users on Twitter (see the replies) and other places want to not use the cloud at all. Now, I get that sh*tting on Google and the cloud for this is fun and all, but there is a big difference between Google Drive and GCP (or Azure, AWS, etc), and we all (everyone in IT at least) know it. That big difference is that if this were to happen to GCP (or Azure, or AWS), then there would be a big difference to what ha ..read more