Saturday Link Roundup
Programming
- Adding the Google Contacts v3 API to my project
- Google Contacts API version 3.0
- Visual Studio Toolbox: Managing User Secrets
Good idea. Only Azure Cloud supported at the moment.
Bitlocker
Office 365
- Setting the Office 365 update channel via Powershell
- Setting the Office 365 update channel via Group Policy
- Change the update channel after you enable Office 365 clients to receive updates from Configuration Manager
- Overview of update channels for Office 365 ProPlus
Other
The Strange Case of “Sometimes I can see the Office Templates directory, and sometimes I can’t.”
One of our customers reported that they intermittently lost access to the Office Templates directory.
Sometimes it worked well, and sometimes “it was gone!”.
The environment was Windows 10, with Office 2016. The Office Templates were located on DFS shares (ie. the location was \\ALargecustomer\DFS\OurTemplates)
What could it possibly be???
Why writing is blocked to C:\Program Files, and some other locations.
It’s the Data Redirection feature that was introduced with Windows Vista, in November 2006.
Data Redirection – beginning with Windows Vista, standard users have restricted access to certain files, folders, and registry keys. When an application is trying to write to these locations, it gets redirected to somewhere else. Most of the time this is transparent to both users and application developers, but sometimes it is not and that lead to some very interesting results.
– Windows Blog: Is Your Application Ready for Windows 7 RTM?
The customer had some issues running SAP Business One. The cause? SAP trying to write to a sub-directory under c:\Program Files (x86)\SAP .
References:
“By enabling insecure guest logons, this setting reduces the security of Windows clients”
The initial thought was “it’s another ‘SMB1 is disabled’ causing connectivity problems” problem.
Except it wasn’t.
The issue was that our customer reported that they could no longer connect to their NAS device.
With Windows 10 v1709, Microsoft disabled Guest Access. In their words:
Cause
This change in default behavior is by design and is recommended by Microsoft for security.
A malicious computer that impersonates a legitimate file server could allow users to connect as guests without their knowledge. Microsoft recommends that you do not change this default setting. If a remote device is configured to use guest credentials, an administrator should disable guest access to that remote device and configure correct authentication and authorization.
Windows and Windows Server have not enabled guest access or allowed remote users to connect as guest or anonymous users since Windows 2000. Only third-party remote devices might require guest access by default. Microsoft-provided operating systems do not.
For the small number of end users who will need to connect to a third-party NAS, we’ll probably manage it via exception.
Windows 10 and Office 365 update lists
The following are sites are where Microsoft list changes to Windows 10 & Office 365
Office 365
- Overview of update channels for Office 365 ProPlus
- Release information for updates to Office 365 ProPlus
- Update history for Office 365 ProPlus (listed by date)
- Office 365 Planned Service Changes
Windows 10
VicRoads Driving Test Routes
Update 2018:
Note that these tests are up to 9 years old. Use as a guide only.
What is here is what is here. I don’t have any other testing routes.
(source: Whirlpool “On The Road” forum and Hienz Driving School)
Carlton (2016)
Start of test –> End of test
Not ready for production … ReFS
So Resilient File System (ReFS) has been for 6 years so it should be stable for use with a backup drive, right?
Nope:
“Because ReFS was designed not to fail, if failure does occur, there are no tools provided to repair it”
When it does fail, you might just end up with a 2TB backup drive that you cannot read.
🙁
I found one third-party tool which does work, ReclaiMe.
Seems to work well. If I need to pull data off this backup drive, I’ll purchase a license.
The last time my computer was seen on the network …
was something I wrote about 8 years ago, in Detecting inactive computers in your AD domain.
So it was time to update that*.
Get-ADComputer -Filter * -Properties Name, LastLogonTimeStamp | Select-Object -Property Name, CanonicalName, @{ n = "LastLogonDate"; e = { [datetime]::FromFileTime( $_.lastLogonTimestamp ) } } | Export-CSV -NoTypeInformation "C:\temp\lastlogontimestamp.csv"
will give you a handy list of computer name and the last time they were seen on the network#.
* The Quest product is no longer free.
# within the last 14 days.
Reference:
PowerShell: Get-ADComputer to retrieve computer last logon date – part 1
Converting LastLogon to DateTime format
Script: LastLogonTimestamp export csv