DKIM

DKIM. No, it’s not a new singer/rapper/influencer/whatever. It’s a DNS controlled Email Authentication mechanism. What does that mean? Well, if you want a technical explanation, go see my article on Authorization vs Authentication, since that is important to understand if you want to understand DKIM. DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It uses a feature of Public Key Authentication to allow receiving mail servers to verify that the message is not modified in transit and that the sender is authentic. 

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Technical Overview – Configuration Change in Name parameter for Exchange Online

If you’re an admin for a Microsoft 365 account, you probably received an email from the Microsoft Message Center titled “Configuration Change in Name parameter for Exchange Online.” The email states that Microsoft will be changing the way the Name attribute functions in Azure AD/MS 365. Unfortunately, the email and associated documentation doesn’t do a good job of explaining the reasoning and implications of the change.…

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So You Want to Work in IT – Part 1 – Industry Overview

One of my great loves in IT is helping to mentor new technicians who are either just starting out or are only a couple years in. I love this kind of mentoring because it gives me the opportunity to help get people on a good path so they can succeed and become effective workers. So, I’ve decided to write up a few posts that go over some of the ins and outs of the industry so newer IT specialists or people who are just considering a career in IT can arm themselves with knowledge.…

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SChannel 36887 Errors in Windows Server

The Problem: You open up the Windows event viewer and see loads of Red SChannel 36887 errors. If you’re like most admins, you want to fix this problem, but can’t really figure out how. These errors are notoriously hard to resolve because they don’t often happen regularly. Most of the time, you don’t know the exact configuration that caused the error, so it’s impossible to replicate the errors in a way that allows you to run wireshark to figure things out directly, so you just have to go off the error message and what it includes.…

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AC Brown’s Cloud Guide- Part 2 – Cloud Architecture

In my last post, we covered the basic concepts of cloud computing. This time, we’ll be diving down a little deeper into the cloud to cover the actual structure that most cloud environments use to operate. There are a lot of differences between cloud providers, but they all use very similar hardware and network designs to get things done.…

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Exchange Server Maintenance Functions

Exchange server maintenance requires some specific steps in 2013+. There is no specific maintenance mode, as in previous versions, but you can complete a few actions to take a server out of production. You will need to drain the SMTP queues on the server, tag the services as unavailable, then disable transport entirely. Each step needs to have some rest time, so that is built into the script.…

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Fixing Outlook Certificate Errors

How to solve problems with Exchange Autodiscover. Certificate Error issues in particular.

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