TCA Podcast Episode 69: Exchange Server - Fine wine or Swiss cheese?

We love Exchange Server! No, really - I’ve personally been working with Exchange Server in some form or fashion since Exchange Server 5.5 in the late ’90s and in some circles that makes me a late bloomer. It is difficult to ignore what seems like an endless list of day-zero vulnerabilities that have plagued our old friend over the last 12 - 18 months. These vulnerabilities have seen security researchers pointing the finger and the tech press calling Exchange Server a security liability. It’s 2022, should you really still be hosting your own email? In this episode, Nic and I discuss the relevance of Exchange Server and attempt to answer this question.

During this episode we refer to a couple of recent articles, here are the links:

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TCA Podcast Episode 68: In the kitchen with Chef

We apologize for the poor audio at the beginning of this episode - we’re not sure what happened, but it does improve as the episode progresses.

What is DevOps? The answer will often differ depending on who you ask. In this episode we asked Prashanth from Chef that question. He shares some great insights with us, including how DevOps practices can be used in an infrastructure and IT operations context. We also delve into Infrastructure as code (IaC) and its usefulness for provisioning and configuration management.

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TCA Podcast Episode 67: PSA - The end of Basic Auth in Exchange Online (no, really!)

Microsoft first announced the deprecation of Basic Authentication in September 2019 with the intention of starting the retirement process in October 2020. Those plans were subsequently postponed and needless to say it’s been a long journey for many organizations to prepare for the inevitable. Sadly though, it seems not everyone received the memo and there are many organizations that still use basic auth extensively. Our old friend, Greg Taylor has been examining the telemetry and shared some interesting insights with us. We talk more about this change, what it means for you and how you can prepare for it (if you haven’t already!) The clock is ticking..

Not sure if and how this affects you and your organization or interested to know more? Check out Deprecation of Basic authentication in Exchange Online

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TCA Podcast Episode 66: Use your dongle

In this episode we chat to James “UCMadScientist” Arber. Some of you may know him as the guy who ran Doom on a Sonus/Ribbon SBC 1000 or set fire to a Polycom CX series phone, but James is also extremely knowledgable when it comes to all things Microsoft Teams. We had a lot of fun talking about the current state of Teams, room systems, devices, and the importance of using your dongle.

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TCA Podcast Episode 65: ISO 27001:2022, say what?

As an IT professional, governance and compliance have never been the sexiest of concepts. For many of us, these are things that distract us once a year when they require the yearly tick-in-the-box. It is important that we face the reality of the world we live in though and understand that we do have a responsibility of bridging two worlds. In this episode we had the opportunity to sit down with Rufaro Warinda to talk all about compliance, ISO 27001, CIS and a whole bunch of other acronyms. Rufaro does a fantastic job of explaining various concepts like the difference between Legislative and regulatory compliance and we take a look at how Microsoft technologies map to the new ISO controls.

Here’s a link to Rufaro’s really handy reference New ISO 27001:2022 controls & How Microsoft Saves the Day.

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TCA Podcast Episode 63: Tech Simplified

This episode is all about certifications. I sat my first industry certification exam in the late 1990’s and it’s safe to say that certifications and the way the industry views them has changed a lot over the years. Are certifications important or even relevant anymore? This can be a very polarizing topic, I recently asked Sly Gittens from Tech Simplified all about it.

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TCA Podcast Episode 62: Human Journey

We recently had the pleasure of talking to a long time friend of the show Jay Gundotra. Jay is incredibly passionate about the community and you have most probably seen the ENow Software booth or attended one of their parties at Ignite or some other industry event. We talk about his journey from Exchange Server specialist to Founder and CEO and how everyone has a unique journey. We also get deep about how it is important to learn from our own experiences - good or bad and how self care is vital to longevity in our industry today.

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Azure AD Connect (ADSync) Event 6900

A little while back I was asked to help troubleshoot an issue with Azure AD Connect. Everything was working great before, but all of a sudden Azure AD Connect stopped sync’ing successfully. When looking at the event log on the server, I noticed an ADSync event 6900 that seemed to indicate an issue with MFA. It said “The ADSync service is not allowed to interact with the desktop to authenticate…” as shown below

This event was accompanies by a few others, like Events 904, 906, 659

After logging into Azure AD, I found that a Conditional Access policy has been enabled to enforce MFA on all administrator accounts and this was tripping up the ADSync account. To solve the problem, simply add an exclusion to the policy. You can do this in two ways, either exclude the specific account or exclude the “Directory Synchronization Accounts” role. I chose the latter option

TCA Podcast Episode 61: Inner Warrior

In this episode we had the pleasure of talking to Kexin Ye and hearing her inspirational story of personal growth and how she went from selling Fair trade “coffee to fighting to tech”. We also talk about chaos engineering, technical debt and the importance of a sound cloud strategy.

If you’re interested in chaos engineering, here are some additional links you might want to check out:

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