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

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

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

When building automated processes, Microsoft Azure Automation just doesn’t always do the trick. Sometimes, you want third-party PowerShell modules, or you just need to be able to call some legacy application, or you just need access to on-premise resources such as a database server or file server, none of which are doable all that easily (if at all). This means that you need to run them from a physical machine or virtual machine, either on-premises or in the cloud. As our company has been moving to the cloud, the company has been moving to only PaaS services and has not put any virtual machine ..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

Will you be attending the PASS Data Community Summit 2023 or Microsoft Ignite 2023? If you are, we’ve got THE party of the conference for you to attend. DCAC has hosted a welcome Karaoke party at Cow Girls Inc. in downtown Seattle for several years, and we are repeating this event this year and inviting all the attendees from Microsoft Ignite and the PASS Data Community Summit to attend. As is our norm, the event is free to attend; you simply need to sign up and present your ticket at the door (either the physical ticket or via the Event Bright app on your phone). We’ve made a slight change t ..read more

When an individual files for bankruptcy under Chapter 13, the courts appoint an impartial party, called a trustee, to investigate the case and help that person throughout the process. Bankruptcy Trustees are usually, but not always attorneys. The US Department of Justice oversees roughly 170 Chapter 13 Trustees around the country under the Office of the Standing Chapter 13 Trustee.Mark Bonney is one of those Chapter 13 Trustees who works in the Eastern District of Oklahoma and has been guiding people through their Chapter 13 bankruptcy filings since he opened his office in 1989. He essentially ..read more

When you download SQL Server Management Studio 19.1 or higher, and you go to connect to an Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance, you’ll see a difference in the default behavior when you go to sign in to Azure. Instead of SSMS using the internal browser to have you log in, SSMS will open the default OS browser instead. This change is needed because if you need to verify or update your MFA settings, the default browser which is built into SSMS doesn’t meet the requirements of the MFA portal so the process would fail and stop. The solution (which Meagan blogged about a few weeks ago ..read more

A couple of weeks ago, I was one of the delegates at Storage Field Day 25 in San Francisco, CA. We started the event with a session from CyberSense. I assumed this would be a nice easy, kickback session to start the event with. Boy was I wrong; their session really showed me how horrible ransomware attackers can be to victim companies. Hand using keyboard Don’t get me wrong; I understand how ransomware works and what we need to do to prevent it, but the insidious methods that ransomware can take, especially when performing a targeted attack against a company that their solution scans for, just ..read more