Hope This Helps - A Tech Podcast

The STiffs return to podcasting after a very long week. The cloud has changed, Loop still isn't a thing, Viva and Entra are around, and Linux Mint vs Windows 11!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Boot-up (AKA, "LAST WEEK, ON HOPE THIS HELPS")

Windows 11

Co-Pilots

The end of Windows?

The Year(s) of Linux

Outro - "Plus Delta"

Error messages, meeting etiquette, MFA improvements and concerns, PowerShell with MS Graph, PowerShell Crescendo, random PowerShell things, in a short-but-packed episode!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

=====Boot-up=====

BSoDs and error messages

Phrases I don't wanna hear anymore: "Thank you for your time."

Microsoft Teams - Send praise to people

Better meeting etiquette

The stigma against accepting a meeting as "tentative"

Accepting and not sending a response

Shower thought: There should be a "Mute Mic AND Turn Webcam Off" button in Teams

Parasocial relationships

Real-time followup: There's a PowerToy for it! Go check it out.

Microsoft Authenticator improvements

Suspected Russian Activity Targeting Government and Business Entities Around the Globe

=====PowerShell Drunk Jawer (it's like a Junk Drawer shut up)=====

Microsoft Graph PowerShell got way easier + Azure AD Temporary Access Pass

Tiff asks: Why are Enterprise Apps and App Registrations in two different places?

Azure AD security attributes

Microsoft Graph API: The dangerous line between script writer and developer. It's a high barrier of entry to a non-developer.

Graph PowerShell Module

The Ups and Downs of Connecting to the Microsoft Graph Using the PowerShell SDK

Installing modules in PowerShell 7 vs Windows PowerShell (admin level vs user)

PowerShell Crescendo Release Candidate - But why JSON? What's wrong with advanced functions?

PowerShellGet 3.0 Preview 12 - More useful for developers developers developers?

Global variables in PowerShell 7 are funky if you use -UseWindowsPowerShell with import-module

Make test accounts with this one simple trick! 1..300|%{$_}

Correction: This technically isn't an array

Range Operators in PowerShell

Always make your functions return psobjects containing data. It's better for you, the environment, and your pets.

=====“Unplanned Outage” (Sponsor section - “Hope this Helps is helped by…‘)=====

The rewind button. Be sure to rewind this podcast when done listening so the next person doesn't have to

=====Outro - "Plus Delta"=====

Montero (Call Me by Your Name)

We help you, you help us: Rate us on iTunes

Microsoft Ignite 2021 hot takes! Multi-Cloud MultiBall, Loop, Teams, Viva, PowerShell install variations, and Zune on macOS!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

===Boot-up===

We help this hopes

===Microsoft Ignite 21H2===

Defender madness - so many confusing name changes!

Multi-Cloud MultiBall

"Now, native support for multicloud environments is available through the extension of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection capabilities to Amazon Web Services (AWS)."…Do other clouds actually want Microsoft to butt in?

Actual quote from someone (Mary Jo Foley?) at Microsoft: "It's like a Big Mac: Have it Your Way"

Tiff's experience working at Wendy's

LOOP THERE IT IS

Does it replace OneNote?? (No)

Does it replace Whiteboard? (Maybe?)

Clarification: Loop is an Office app.

The feature imparity between Windows and Mac versions of certain Office apps

MS Roadmap updated and has moved MS Teams connect to March 2022, I just want shared channels.

Speed/ease of use - When people choose illogical/unexpected solutions

Remember Viva?

PowerShell's store version versus the standalone MSI version

Frustrating differences between them

VS Code integration for Store version is off

Running as a different user can get hairy

Just install the MSI version, the Store version is annoying

Installing PowerShell on macOS via HomeBrew is fantastic

===This is the way===

Microsoft presents for a long time about why passwords suck

Types of Passwordless auth

Unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch

iOS Security Guide - Page 8 - Passcode supersedes biometrics at first boot

Are passwords and policies truly worthless?

Counterpoint: They have their place in the correct use cases.

===State of the Zunion===

Steve's attempts to get Zune working on macOS Big Sur

The Apple Event, Windows 11 features, Defender for Endpoint updates, Docker, Terraform, and fingers!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Note: Our apologies for wavering audio quality, we had some technical difficulties again!

The Fork-Up

-Don't Fork your Parent

-Finger

Boot-up

-Apple Creates the World's Best Computer...of 2009? New Macbook pro has real ports

-The Surface event

Win 11

-Vista 2.0? Not really

-Windows 11 WSL 2 is almost as quick as running Linux natively

-Installing Wine using Homebrew on macOS

Player One DFEated

-Defending Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2016

-"The solution does not use or require the installation of the Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA)."

-There's an installer now!

-So what about Server 2012 support?

More Apple things

-Apple Music "Voice Plan" - Bad for accessibility. What about those who are mute? Inconvenience for a lower price?

-Pumpkin HomePod

Hope This Helps Tip of the Something

-Don't sudo rm -rf your docker storage folder

-Things that may happen:

-Images gone

-Errors trying to update containers

-If a container is restarted it will not come back

-Portainer will explode

-You'll have to rebuild all your docker-compose stacks in Portainer (hope you had a backup)

Terraform

-Tiff's experience with WSL + Linux + Docker + Terraform

-Enabling Virtualization in AMD BIOS is oddly esoteric

-F7 for Advanced Mode - CPU Configuration - SVM Mode - Enabled - Guide

Microsoft Exams, Passwordless login, Identity and Access Management, Microsoft 365 landmines, and more!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Note: Our apologies for wavering audio quality, we had some technical difficulties!

Boot-up

    Delilah

    Human Robots + Cyborgs

    Remember on-premise? There's a cert for that

    Microsoft exams are hard!

    Passwordless login

    New identity partnerships and integrations to accelerate your Zero Trust journey

    Metroid: Other M and Privileged Identity Management

    DEFCON Patch Alerts It's like the French Toast Alert System for patches

    Apple zero-day vulnerability

    Update/correction: Snow Leopard was last updated in early 2016 just so you could jump to a newer version of OS X in the Mac App Store.

    Update/correction: Steve meant the 2010 Macbook Air's ability to run Catalina, not the 2011 one.

    Bo Burnham's "Inside"

Various M365 landmines to be aware of

    Via Joe Stocker (@ITguySoCal)

    We go over almost everything listed here: https://twitter.com/ITguySoCal/status/1431734989792563201

M365 vs O365 vs Azure

    Some things are the same between the two

    Where do they link/not link?

    Two user portals

    Things change and documentation isn't always updated

    Exchange Online's dual portals

    Exchange scripts/Documentation still referencing Skype for Business

That is Accurate

    SSH and Secure Shell have the same amount of syllables

Outlook Web Access, Scrum, Windows Admin Center complaints, Defender for Endpoint complaints, and the world of InfoSec, among other things!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Boot-up

    OWA Suggested Pre-reads on meeting reminders, interesting idea

    Not mad, just disappointed: Cloud shell kinda sucks, I'm complaining about it

    Set-MSOLUserLicense is going away

    The importance of learning programming/scripting/CLI/DevOps, Infrastructure-As-Code, etc.

    Steve figures out git branching

    Scrum, orgs adapting to agile, etc

Windows Admin Center annoys me immensely, but it does work I guess

    Ongoing follow-up from HTH episode 20 and 24 regarding WAC

    Stupid little things, some complaints from HTH0020 are still in play

    Remote PowerShell feature is really picky (and buggy)?

    Must specify credentials in a certain way

    UserVoice pages are 404'd in documentation

    Speed/efficiency issues

    Can't do advanced things like take ownership of registry keys or values, still need regedit to do that

    Semi-related: Manage Active Directory Objects with the New Windows AD Provider for HashiCorp Terraform

Defender for Endpoint device inventory/search/dashboards/reports could be better

    I wish it would support wildcard searches

    Is really picky about exact matches

    Duplicate/misleading entries: Workgroup vs domain

    Removing a device other than waiting for it to age out?

    Fix unhealthy sensors in Microsoft DFE

    Reordering columns isn't possible

    Have to stretch out the browser window across multiple monitors to get full width

    Entire interface is inefficient, sort of like WAC

InfoSec - The new Sysadmin

    CISO MindMap 2021: What do InfoSec Professionals Actually Do?

    How To Get A Job in Cybersecurity

    Look at all this stuff!

    Are they actually sysadmins?

    What IS a sysadmin?

The OWA Experience

    Missing UI elements

    Flagged items in a sidebar

    Has a "To Do" panel but it doesn’t include flagged items

    Calendar flyout is not expanded by default

    Categories (already discussed at length in our blog)

    [old man complaint] Forward as Attachment is different

    GMU.edu guide on how to do it in OWA

    Meeting notifications aren't prominent/obnoxious enough

    No unread "group by folder" view

    Can't add an Office 365 Group as a favorite like you can in Outlook

    Table management in OWA email composition is bugged

    Can't set specific to-do dates for flagged items?

Windows 11 is a thing, Solarwinds is still a thing, Zune is still a thing, PowerBI regional migrations, and Windows 10 learns a new trick. Hope This Helps is back!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Pre-Boot

    Windows 11 and the TPM

    Golf is boring, unless it's mini-golf

    LinkedIn is like the golf course of the internet

Boot Up

    Tiff and Steve's desktop computers, Macs

    Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake

    Solarwinds hacks + version number madness

        Get them on the payroll!

        Remember LulzSec? / LulzSec Leader 'Sabu' Flips on Friends for FBI

        Orion web console tells you one thing in the web console, Database Manager tells you something different

        Version number schemes don't line up…Product Upgrade Advisor uses YYYY.MM based versions while the database still uses legacy 12.x version schemes

    What the heck is Bonjour?

        Bonjour chat

        Barrier uses Bonjour to find other Barrier nodes

    Windows 11 phone integration

        Android apps

    Gripes about macOS Catalyst/"Project Marzipan" apps being half-baked

    macOS uses Home/End keys wrong

    More Windows 11 thoughts

        Windows 11 will require TPM 2.0, UEFI, and Secure Boot

        Surface Studio 2 can't run Windows 11

        People is Removed

    Brief tangent on disconnecting from social media/cloud services/Windows

State of the Zunion

    Elon Musk's tweet

    Steve's Zune-to-M3U-to-AirSonic PowerShell script for playlists

PowerBI data migrations + general cloud frustrations

    Configure Multi-Geo support for Power BI Premium

    Originally you could only pick one region, but more options expanded over time

    Egress costs are expensive - On-prem datacenters wouldn't see these OpEx costs

    It's a headache when moving regions

    MS can sometimes even lose your data during a regional migration?

Out-GridView is temporarily (?) dead (on Mac/Linux)

    No more work is being done on Avalonia-based Out-GridView until we move to .NET MAUI

    Let's talk about how great Out-GridView is on Windows and how nobody knows about it

Windows 10 News (literally)

    The new Windows 10 taskbar "News and interests" widget

    Why exactly was this shoved into a cumulative update? This is a new feature.

    Disabling "News and Interests" causes entire notification area to go blank

    The actual content is low quality

Microsoft service disruptions, Exchange Plus Addressing, UserVoice, Ignite 2021 Recap, Defender for Endpoint, Zune, Outlook Signatures, and more!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Boot Up

    What even are NFTs, anyway? Nobody knows.

    Blog post about PSWindowsUpdate and Outlook Categories

    Outages + Microsoft lying about service issues

    Exchange Plus Addressing

    An SMTP email address uses the basic syntax: @. For example, [email protected]. Plus addressing uses the syntax: +@. For example, [email protected]. Use case: newsletters, junk email, alternate smtps that users can handle on their own

    Replying to individual messages in any chat coming to Teams

    Microsoft breaks Win10 thrice in one month

    No more UserVoice - A Loss For Words

Ignite Recap

    Mesh and bubbles

    Inna-Gadda-Da-Viva Baby

    MARKETING

“Unplanned Outage” (Sponsor section - "Hope this Helps is helped by…")

    "No Hello"

Defender for Endpoint "Deef"

    The portal changed to https://security.microsoft.com/machines from https://securitycenter.windows.com/machines

    Bug in a Defender/SCEP GPO

    Server 2012 is in extended support till 2023, so why is it excluded from DFE while 2008 R2 is still supported?

    Correction: The PowerEdge 2850 can run 2012 but not 2012 R2. Steve got the model number wrong.

State of the Zunion

    Fix Zune software native video conversion! Swap out wmvcore.dll with the 1511 version. 

Outlook Signatures are still a nightmare

    Organization-wide message disclaimers, signatures, footers, or headers in Exchange Online

Parting Words / “Unplanned Outage” (Sponsor section - "Hope this Helps is helped by…")

    "Consider your environment before printing this podcast"

Outro - "Plus Delta"

    We help you, you help us: Rate us on iTunes

Yammer and Defender for Endpoint Rants in a quick Midlife Crisis episode of Hope This Helps!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Cloud service talk, modern workplace thoughts, DevOps versus ITIL, Docker Container of the Week, and a bunch more!

Extended show notes available at https://hthpc.com

Boot Up

    [Semi-off topic variety section] What kind of alcoholic beverage is each cloud service?

    Azure=Tequila, the more you drink it, the more things change

    The VibrationSensorHub Azure IoT lab

    Zune Squirting - 3 Plays or 3 Days

    Pronouncing Azure

    WarHammer / Your state of being at work

    AWS=Jim Beam?

    Google=Bud Light

    Our review of Super Bowl LV

    The first 5G Super Bowl

    iCloud=Heineken

    The 5 minute rule prevails

    Along with rubber duck debugging

    No more old Edge - "Spartan Down"

    CORRECTION: Brave is based on Chromium, and yes there are privacy concerns

    Microsoft meddling with the hosts file

    Viva las Dashboards

    Workspace 365

    Various grumblings about the whole idea

Modern Workplace

    Microsoft and the workplace of the future: How AI can help you build more productive relationships with your colleagues

    Talking (mostly grumbling) about Yammer, Teams distractions

    How far is too far?

    Microsoft patented a chatbot that would let you talk to dead people. It was too disturbing for production

Magsafe is back I guess, what are your thoughts?

    Pacemaker compatibility issues

DevOps versus ITIL

    How to Win the Battle Over Change Management

    "ING found it was able to modify ITIL to work within its new DevOps appr oach. “Don’t do everything the ITIL book says,” advised Jan-Joost Bouwman, ITSM process owner at ING. And yet, following ITIL for practices such as incident management are “still the best way to do it, because everybody knows what to do and you don’t get confused about the rules.”"

Look at all this licensing

    Get your fresh licensing maps at m365maps.com

Docker Container of the Week

    Plex vs Jellyfin

    Plex's Privacy Policy (see the data collection sections) https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/

    Recent Plex DDOS issue via SSDP https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/02/ddosers-are-abusing-the-plex-media-server-to-make-attacks-more-potent/

    Slight correction: Plex started out as freeware

Outro - "Plus Delta"

    Lock the Taskbar https://youtu.be/WEWG6kSYqlY

    We help you, you help us: Rate us on iTunes