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Why is this website so fast?

tom torggler 16 jan 2021

I have recently updated our website and have learned a few things while doing so.

So long, 2020

tom torggler 29 dec 2020

Goodbye 2020! What a year it has been.

Convert PowerShell Help to a Website

tom torggler 21 dec 2020 updated 12 jan 2020

How to use the platyPS PowerShell module to convert comment-based help to markdown and easily host it on GitHub pages.

Using PowerShell and Azure Cognitive Services to convert text to speech

tom torggler 11 jan 2020

In one of our recent Microsoft Teams projects I needed some voice prompts for a customer service call queue.

Configuring policy-based QoS for Teams with Intune

tom torggler 29 nov 2019 updated 14 aug 2020

Traditional Active Directory with group policy has no place in the big-picture of the modern workplace, so we need a novel solution to apply policy-based QoS to our Teams clients.

Send Check Point Logs to Azure Sentinel (beta)

tom torggler 15 jul 2019

Azure Sentinel is Microsoft’s new, cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM) tool. In my simplistic point-of-view it is a security-focused, machine-learning-driven add-on for Log Analytics (OMS). Today we will be looking into ingesting Check Point Firewall logs into Log Analytics.

Create a SAS token for AzCopy

tom torggler 17 jun 2019

I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure this out, so here goes a quick note that hopefully saves someone a minute.

ntSystemsPSDrive: a SHiPS drive for the blog

tom torggler 19 apr 2019

Some time ago I wrote a post about Consuming ntSystems with PowerShell. It boils down to this: we have a json-based API that is available via https://ntsystems.it/api/v1/ and returns json elements for posts and pages on the blog. For more information check out the linked post. Then I wanted play around with the SHiPS module for some time and finally got around to doing it this past weekend. Now I’m happy to be sharing another method do consume ntSystems with PowerShell: It can be mounted as PSDrive.

Powershell Script to enable specific Office 365 Service

daniel nitz 5 feb 2019 updated 5 feb 2019

Currently I’m in an Exchange Migration project to migrate all mailboxes from Exchange onPremise to Exchange Online. Yeah.. of course.. killing Exchange onPrem… again :)

Windows Server 2019 and RADIUS

tom torggler 31 jan 2019 updated 3 jul 2019

First of all, happy new year :) Today we will have a quick look at Windows Server 2019, more specifically the Network Policy Server role.

Sending events to Splunk's HTTP Event Collector with PowerShell

tom torggler 2 dec 2018

Using Invoke-RestMethod to send events to a Splunk instance.

lost & found: FFmpeg and Skype4B, Security Baseline for RS5

tom torggler 7 oct 2018

A quick edition of lost & found on how to use FFmpeg on WSL to create audio files that can be used for Skype for Business announcements. And an observation about the recently published security baseline for Windows 10 1809 and Server 2019.

Remote EMS over IPMI serial-over-lan

tom torggler 1 oct 2018

Using standards-based IPMI to get some sort of out-of-band management for AudioCodes’ embedded server modules.

Network assessment with policy-based QoS and iperf3

tom torggler 22 sep 2018

In Skype for Business and, more recently, Teams deployments, a solid network and a good knowledge of it are fundamentally important.

Exchange Hybrid Observations

tom torggler 16 jun 2018 updated 20 sep 2018

Like I did here with Skype for Business, I’m collecting some observations and useful snippets about Exchange in hybrid environments.

lost & found: Updates and no more tracking on ntSystems.it

tom torggler 3 jun 2018

I’ve recently updated the sources of the blog and moved to the gem-based version of the minima theme. This should make the site easier to maintain in the future.

Azure Functions: Building a Telegram Bot with PowerShell 2

tom torggler 20 may 2018

Welcome back to the second part of our little fun experiment with Telegram and Azure Functions. In the first part we created the function app and the bot, now let’s hook them up.

Azure Functions: Building a Telegram Bot with PowerShell 1

tom torggler 19 may 2018

Today I’ve got a fun one, we’re going to use Azure Functions to build a Telegram Bot with PowerShell. Sounds interesting? Well here we go. Before diving into the technical details, lets have a quick overview of what we’re trying to do.

lost & found: ntSystems Onion Service, Cloudflare DNS

tom torggler 6 apr 2018

It’s Friday and here’s another edition of lost & found.

Skype for Business Hybrid Observations

tom torggler 15 mar 2018 updated 2 dec 2018

A collection of information about Skype for Business in hybrid environments.

Azure AD Connect: Failed to load configuration information

tom torggler 22 feb 2018

When upgrading Azure AD Connect (ADSync), the wizard fails with the error: “Failed to load configuration information from primary ADFS server”.

Tunneling SSH through Tor

tom torggler 24 dec 2017

I’ve been using Onion Services aka. Hidden Services to connect to remote machines for some time now. Tor clients can connect to such services through the Tor network, there is no need to know the IP address of the destination machine, likewise there is no need to configure inbound port mappings or firewall rules.

Testing CoinHive

tom torggler 22 sep 2017 updated 12 jan 2018

I’ve recently stumbled upon coinhive and with all the recent fuzz about crypto currencies, I decided to have a look at it. So what’s that all about?

The Invisible Internet Project and WSL

tom torggler 10 aug 2017 updated 22 jan 2018

The Windows Subsystem for Linux can be used to run quite a few interesting things on Windows, one of them is the Invisible Internet Project or i2p.

PowerShell and Variable References

tom torggler 18 may 2017 updated 23 may 2017

I’ve come across an interesting behavior (or feature) of PowerShell the other day. As I don’t really understand what’s going on, I decided to write it up, maybe someone out there can help explaining this.

Jekyll on WSL

tom torggler 24 apr 2017 updated 16 jan 2018

Today we are looking at running Jekyll on WSL or Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.

Keeping track of PowerShellCore releases on GitHub

tom torggler 16 apr 2017

I’ve been using PowerShell Core on my MacBook for a while now. As the code is still in its early stages, there’s no way of managing/updating the software one is running, at least none that I would be aware of. I did miss some updates and, as a result, had problems with Visual Studio Code. So I’ve put together a quick function that checks the latest release on GitHub and can conveniently be put into my $PROFILE.

Jekyll Fun: Consuming ntSystems with PowerShell

tom torggler 31 mar 2017

As you might have read before, our little blog is powered by Jekyll. Well I stumbled over the jsonify filter the other day, and so I built a little “kind-of” API :) Sound interesting? Read on.

My takeaways from MS Tech Summit

tom torggler 25 mar 2017

Daniel and I have attended the Microsoft Tech Summit in Milan earlier this week. Overall it was a pretty good event, especially taking into account that it was free. The keynote was quite interesting, so much so, that I thought I’d share my takeaways.

Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner

daniel nitz 15 mar 2017

Today I was super excited about the first tests with the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner. Sometimes calculating the Bandwidth, Storage, local infrastructure needed for Site Recovery can be very tricky. Therefore, I’m happy that Microsoft released a helpful tool to get the right information needed.

Get Going with Go!

tom torggler 24 feb 2017

Everyone is talking about Go these days so I decided to have a look at it and see what it could do for me.

Get started with Azure ARM Templates

daniel nitz 20 feb 2017

To start with the deployment using Azure ARM Templates is quite easy. A first step can be to deploy an Azure SQL Database. But let’s start with a bit of background information:

Disable Azure Backup Protection for a VM with Azure PowerShell

daniel nitz 15 feb 2017

My Azure credits burn faster than expected :) So I decided to remove some VM’s and Backup that I used for a customer’s demonstration. Since I don’t use the Azure Portal for configuration anymore, I fired up Powershell and did the Job. With the following commands, I show you how to stop the Backup for a Virtual Machine and delete the associated Recovery Points.

Migrating from BlogEngine to GitHub Pages: Fixing the links

tom torggler 31 oct 2016

In this episode of our little series on migration we are having a look at the URL structure of Jekyll and some of the less visible stuff that was associated with the old ntSystems.

Introducing: TAK

tom torggler 28 oct 2016

Over the years I did create, find, copy, paste, quite a few lines of PowerShell code. Some of which I’m turning into re-usable functions and collecting in a module, creatively called “Tom’s Admin Kit” or TAK. I hope you find it useful. I try to credit the sources for the stuff that I just copied off of the interwebs, even though I don’t actually remember all of them.

AzureStack POC TP2 on VMware

tom torggler 19 oct 2016

I’ve been trying to make the Azure Stack Proof-of-Concept (Preview 2) run on VMware and here is what I found.

Migrating from BlogEngine to GitHub Pages: BlogML to Markdown

tom torggler 17 oct 2016

As promised here, I’m sharing the first part of our migration process from BlogEngine to GitHub Pages. A major part is, obviously, the migration of the content of the blog itself.

Welcome to our new blog!

tom torggler 5 oct 2016

This site has been running on Azure Web Sites for some time. As we are doing this for fun and are not making any money with the site (see any ad?) we had to use the “Shared” pricing tier which was economically acceptable but from a performance and feature point-of-view, well, not great. We used Cloudflare to get some caching and enable stuff like https and IPv6 for the site and it was OK :) Then came…

PowerShell on macOS

tom torggler 2 oct 2016

Just sharing some quick notes on how to run PowerShell (and dotnet core) on macOS Sierra.

Deploying Labs using Azure Resource Manager

tom torggler 23 jul 2016 updated 12 jan 2021

I did a demo of Cisco CSR 1000v on Azure the other day and the easy deployment of a small test-network was part of that demo.

Veeam direct restore to Azure

13 jul 2016

Lync SDN API and Cisco WLC

26 jun 2016 updated 18 apr 2017

Some days ago I had the chance to test Cisco’s Wireless LAN Controllers with the Lync Software Defined Networking (SDN) API.

Azure Backup - Part Three

17 apr 2016

lost & found: Nano Server, GitHub, PSGallery, Pester

16 apr 2016

Azure Storage Explorer, the easy way to manage your storage

6 apr 2016

Azure Backup - Part Two

4 apr 2016

Azure Backup - Part One

27 mar 2016

Hyper-Convergence with Nano Server: Part 3

24 mar 2016

Hyper-Convergence with Nano Server: Part 2

10 mar 2016

Azure File Services

7 mar 2016

Re-register Azure MFA Server

22 feb 2016

Hyper-Convergence with Nano Server: Part 1

19 feb 2016

In this post I’m walking through the steps creating the images for my Nano Servers and then deploying them. Like in this post, I’ll use WDS for the deployment, so some steps might already be familiar.

Install Office Web Apps Server 2013 on Server 2012 R2

13 feb 2016

Hyper-Convergence with Nano Server: Intro

8 feb 2016

lost & found: Onyx

4 jan 2016

Happy holidays and some numbers

31 dec 2015

lost & found: OpenLiveWriter, RackHD, EHC, diskspd

18 dec 2015

Domain-joining the vCenter Server Appliance 6

10 dec 2015

Azure Backup: Restore

3 dec 2015

Installing Nano Server using WDS and PxE

26 nov 2015

lost & found: TP4, TH2, Win32-OpenSSH, VS Code

25 nov 2015

Getting started with vCenter Server Appliance 6

1 nov 2015

Netscaler as ADFS Proxy

28 sep 2015

Azure Backup

6 sep 2015

Getting started with OSX

23 aug 2015

Moving on!

16 aug 2015

How to prepare for Exchange 2013 PF migration and what the Microsoft Guide doesn’t tell you

23 feb 2015

netsh trace and the Message Analyzer

15 feb 2015

Considerations when planning for DirectAccess

4 feb 2015

WMF 5 Preview: Update is not applicable to your computer

21 oct 2014

Windows 10 VHD Boot

9 oct 2014

lost & found: Windows Tech Preview, Delve, Sway and Keybase.io

6 oct 2014

SCVMM–HyperV Script to reboots VM’s with powershell

19 aug 2014

Lync 2013 backend on SQL Cluster with mixed authentication mode

15 aug 2014

Moving to Azure…

7 aug 2014

NoOp and NAT Traversal

29 jul 2014

IPv6 im Unternehmen

10 jun 2014

Work Folders Demo mit Microsoft Azure

29 may 2014

ActiveDirectory DisplayName mit Umlauten und AudioCodes ISDN

4 may 2014 updated 3 aug 2017

Vor einigen Tagen bin ich in einem Lync Projekt auf das Problem gestoßen, dass bestimmte Benutzer keine Anrufe in das PSTN (ISDN E1) tätigen konnten. Der Kunde setzt ein AudioCodes Gateway ein, die Syslogs des Gatways sind zur Fehlersuche sehr gut geeignet. Das Gateway bekommt die SIP Signalisierung von Lync sowie die Q.931 Signalisierung aus dem ISDN mit.

App-V and the start menu folder redirection issue

4 apr 2014

Lync: SIP inter-domain federation with Cisco Unified Presence - 2

3 mar 2014

Lync: SIP inter-domain federation with Cisco Unified Presence - 1

3 mar 2014

Lync Conf 2014 Keynote

19 feb 2014

Exchange 2010 Update-HybridConfiguration

12 feb 2014

Lync 2013 Hosting Pack v2 and Skype federation

8 feb 2014

Lync Client certificate warning Exchange Autodiscover

8 feb 2014

Migration: ntSystems Mail von Aruba nach Office 365

1 feb 2014

Connect to Office 365 with Powershell

5 jan 2014

Import Certificate to RD

5 jan 2014

PAL: Performance Analyse

21 dec 2013

Windows Azure – Point to Site VPN

6 dec 2013

CNG Certificates and Lync/ TMG

29 oct 2013

How to build an UAG 2010 Array for Exchange publishing–Part 2

27 oct 2013

Connect Sharepoint 2013 with Exchange 2013 to sync tasks

15 oct 2013

ActiveSync devices ask for authentication

15 oct 2013

Lync 2013 Survivable Branch Server – Installation

4 oct 2013

Hyper-V General access denied error

27 sep 2013

Lync 2013 Survivable Branch Server – Planung

21 sep 2013

Lync Private Line

14 sep 2013

date_modified: Invoke-SEFAUtil

8 sep 2013

Exchange Unified Messaging Sprachauswahl

31 aug 2013

Lync Server Backup

28 aug 2013

Outlook Autodiscover and what to do when migrating from Exchange 2010 to 2013

15 aug 2013

Troubleshooting Sharepoint Error Messages

11 aug 2013

Lync: Music on Hold / Wartemusik

10 aug 2013

SIP: Anruf halten

9 aug 2013

Invoke-SEFAUtil – a PowerShell wrapper function

7 aug 2013 updated 1 mar 2018

I had to use SEFAUtil to get some tasks done the other day. As I prefer using PowerShell over just another command line tool, I decided to come up with a quick wrapper function that is intended to make my life a little easier.

Your Windows phone does not support this server version…

5 aug 2013

Migrating from Exchange 2010 to 2013 – part 5

14 jul 2013

Web Application Proxy in Windows 2012 R2 preview

29 jun 2013

Lync and Exchange 2013 OWA integration

16 jun 2013

Migrating from Exchange 2010 to 2013 – part 4

9 jun 2013

Exchange 2013, Open Public Folder on Exchange 2010

4 jun 2013

Configure Exchange 2013 CAS Array with WNLB and enable Kerberos support for OA

1 jun 2013

Migrating from Exchange 2010 to 2013 – part 3

26 may 2013

Exchange 2013 clean install but many MSExchange Common 106 errors

23 may 2013

How to build an UAG 2010 Array for Exchange publishing–Part 1

22 may 2013

Migrating from Exchange 2010 to 2013 – part 2

20 may 2013

Migrating from Exchange 2010 to 2013 – part 1

17 may 2013

What’s happening these days…

15 may 2013

Joining WiFi before login on Mac OS X 10.8

19 apr 2013

Patching Office Web Apps Server

28 mar 2013

Prepare Windows Server 2012 for Lync 2013

18 mar 2013

Installing Lync 2013 Updates

18 mar 2013

ActiveSync, ForeFront TMG and AccountLockoutThreshold

25 feb 2013

Lync 2013 (Client) and LyncDiscoverInternal

9 feb 2013

Lync 2013 – Installation and Certificates

2 feb 2013

Lync 2013 – Prepare AD and build Topology

2 feb 2013

Lync 2013 – Voicemail Escape

30 jan 2013

Windows Server 2012 – Virtualized Domain Controller

26 jan 2013

PowerShell v3 Invoke-WebRequest

4 dec 2012

Microsoft NDES and Cisco IOS – part 2

30 nov 2012

Microsoft NDES and Cisco IOS – part 1

30 nov 2012

With digital certificates being the de-facto standard for authentication, a handy enrollment model is key (pun intended). Microsoft included it’s NDES or Network Device Enrollment Service as a Role in Windows 2008, it has been available as add-on for Windows 2003, too.