I recently worked on a site-to-site VPN tunnel between a Meraki MX and a virtual Fortigate appliance in Azure. No matter what I did I could not get the tunnel up despite confirming the phase 1/2 and PSK settings multiple times. A few tricks I learned along the way that got me there: Even when you do all of that, it will not work. The missing piece was: The Fortigate sends the Local ID as…
I recently setup a few AVD pools for internal and customer use. I was running into an issue where OneDrive login would not persist across logins. After every sign in to the session host I had to re-authenticate. Then I built another pool that was even worse – Office activation wouldn’t stick either. If you have ever gone done the Google rabbit hole of WAM, ADAL, Office Shared Computer Activation, License Token roaming and so…
While working on a client’s Azure subscription(s) I found that my CSP privs weren’t giving me owner permissions through Partner Center. This was due to the fact that the client had multiple subscriptions and only one of them was created by my firm through Partner Centers. The other was a retail, Azure Plan sub. I wanted to have the engineers in my firm admin the subscription with their partner tenant account rather than an in-tenant…
Background With the potential of SSL certificates in Chrome being considered expired after 90 days and the inevitable downtime from not renewing a certificate in time, its time to get serious about automating the renewal and installation of certificates on all platforms. This process is well honed for popular webservers but other applications require custom solutions. Microsoft Remote Desktop Services relies heavily on trusted SSL certificates to function properly. I’ve worked on two methods of…
Problem Statement and Proposed solution I use Apple HomeKit as my smart home platform of choice. Its not perfect and doesn’t have nearly the ecosystem that Alexa does but I like it and it compliments the fact that I use mostly Apple devices in the rest of my network. I don’t do anything all that complicated because I rent so there is a limit to the amount of smarts I can integrate. One feature I…