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.…
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.…
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.…
You, like me, might want to export all of (or a subset of) the Azure Datacenter IP ranges in PowerShell. Doing this is a little more complicated than it should be, but after hours of digging, I’ve manage to do it! (whee!) And here are the basic instructions:
1. Create an Azure Pay-as-you-go subscription by going to portal.azure.com…
Probably the most annoying thing about email security these days is the fact that there are still organizations out there that don’t offer TLS encryption on their SMTP servers. In my opinion, we are well past the point where this should be enabled on all servers. It’s a very simple configuration change that takes no more than 5 minutes to enable.…
*Deep movie announcer voice* In a world where Email must go through arises a new hero! Only he could fully apply the changes made to receive connectors without destroying the WORLD!
Okay, not really. But I wrote a script that will run through all of the Exchange servers in an environment and restart the transport servers on each.…
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.…
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.…
How to solve problems with Exchange Autodiscover. Certificate Error issues in particular.
Exchange Server (And Exchange Online) can be a little confusing at times, particularly when we're dealing with mail routing. Internal mail routes are handled almost automatically (especially if you keep all your Exchange servers in the same AD Site, which I recommend), but how do you get it to route email to mail servers *outside* your organization? This post answers all the questions you might have about how to handle Special Mail Routing cases for Exchange.