For a while now I have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on looking into the security of Windows 11 and using Intune (Endpoint Security) and Defender to not only report on issues but also bring to light how important it is to patch, this not only includes Windows 11 itself but also applications such as Adobe, Microsoft Office, etc. to name some of the applications tested. While we won’t dive into the licensing section of what is required to have this setup, on the Intune side of things, we can manage a whole lot of things, here is a snippet of the Intune Admin Center. I was amazed th ..read more

Today I downloaded and upgraded my Windows 2022 Server (DC Role) in my lab to the latest Windows Server Insider Edition. This is test lab so I would not recommend installing preview versions on production servers. As with Windows 11 Insider Preview, there are new features that come out you can test, actually picked up a bug in the setup that shows Windows 11 after you resume the setup which is in the screenshots. Below are the steps performed, this machine has 4GB ram, 4CPU’s and 60GB HDD and the upgrade to the latest Windows Insider Server build took less than 45 min. Shown above, the ISO im ..read more

For many Admins like myself that work in Notepad all the time, I am happy to say that the team have done what we have all been wanting for a long time and that is firstly have the application mirror what theme or settings you have in the OS and allow multiple tabs instead of having multiple sessions of Notepad open. As you can see in the image below, you have the ability now to add all the tabs you want (maybe not too many :-)) and I prefer dark mode, so this is a welcome change. If you want to read more about this, head over to the Windows Insider blog (link below) and if you are registered ..read more

In our environments, there may come a time when you need to make changes, for example you may need to retire servers as your footprint is reducing or you have a problematic server that you want to remove, which-ever scenario you are in that involves, it may require uninstalling or hard removing a server. Below is a scenario where two “healthy” servers had to be removed but resulted in having to do some removal in the registry to fix it. Problem: In this scenario we were running Windows Server 2019 Core Edition and the uninstall has to take place using the command line as you have not graphical ..read more

This is a reminder that Exchange 2013 support ends on April 11 2023. Make sure you start preparing for deployment of new Exchange 2019 Servers, Virtual or Physical or transition to the cloud. It is vitally important to stay ahead with patches etc. to keep your systems safe. Below is the article on Tech Community. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/exchange-server-2013-end-of-support-coming-soon/ba-p/3714799 ..read more

As Exchange/IT Admins, updating an SSL certificate is easily achieved using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) and normally assigning the services to the new SSL certificate and performing an IISRESET, everything carries on working, however if you have updated your Send and/or Receive Connectors to use a TLS certificate name, this will give you a few errors from partner domains that are either relaying mail through you or something specific is assigned to the connectors. The errors you may receive from remote email systems could be the following and not limited to: Host does not advertise ST ..read more

For those familiar with Exchange and have been working over the years with it, whether it is Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019, you normally login to the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) and then create your certificate request directly from there. With Exchange now, you have to use PowerShell to create your certificate request as the option has been removed as shown below: We need to use the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) to firstly generate our certificate request and then export it to a file after that so we can upload the information to a certificate authority like Digicert etc ..read more

With Windows Server 2022 now supported, I moved my lab from Exchange 2019 running on Windows Server 2019 Core to Windows Server 2022 Core. I did a complete reinstall as you cannot do in-place upgrades on Exchange Servers and domain controllers. My DC’s are also now running Windows Server 2022 Core. The OS installs are pretty much the same and we are not going to deep dive into this in this article. There is a slight update if you want to call it that, where Windows Server 2022 already includes .NET 4.8 so it saves you running that install in quiet mode (if you don’t use this the install fails ..read more

With the security landscape constantly changing, your operating system needs to be in check as well. In Windows 11 Security, you may notice that the icon in the taskbar has an exclamation, meaning something needs to be checked or enabled. You can now turn on the option for Memory Integrity which can help prevent attacks in high-security process as shown below: Once you enable the radio button, you will be prompted to restart your device as shown below: You can click the home button to give you a high level overview of your device as shown below: Take the time to address anything that has a ..read more

In the landscape of forever changing threats, one that is always overlooked is the FTP service running on machines. In Windows 11, this is no different to legacy versions that were running FTP. As a simple exercise, I installed a Windows 11 machine, this machine is vanilla, meaning it has none of the items below: No Anti-Virus No Group Policy Not domain joined No restrictions Installation/Configuration To enable FTP on Windows 11, I went over to Control Panel and then clicked on Programs & Features and then on the left-hand side, I selected the option to turn windows features on or off w ..read more