Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 1

9th of March, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Over the past six months, Microsoft have launched a number of features in Azure to enable you to better manage your resources hosted there.

In this two part series, I will show how we can leverage two of these new features – Azure Automation and Azure Resource Manager – to schedule the shutting down of tagged Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure.

  • In Part 1 we will walk through tagging resources using the Azure Resource Manager features and
  • In Part 2 we will setup Azure Automation to schedule a runbook to execute nightly and shutdown tagged VM resources.
… [Keep reading] “Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 1”

Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region

16th of November, 2014 / / 11 Comments

I have a number of DEV/TEST Virtual Machines (VMs) deployed to Azure Regions in Southeast Asia (Singapore) and West US as these were the closet to those of us living in Australia. Now that the new Azure Regions in Australia have been launched, it’s time to start migrating those VMs closer to home. Manually moving VMs between Regions is pretty straight forward and a number of articles already exist outlining the manual steps.

To migrate an Azure VM to another Region

  1. Shutdown the VM in the source Region
  2. Copy the underlying VHDs to storage accounts in the new Region
  3. Create OS and Data disks in the new Region
  4. Re-create the VM in the new Region.
… [Keep reading] “Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region”

Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs

6th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or Session Riding) is the invocation of unauthorised commands that are triggered by a trusted user. A malicious website could make use of the fact that a user is logged in to a vulnerable website to then ride that session and forge requests. CSRF is a very common type of attack and ASP.NET has had the AntiForgery library for a long time. What’s interesting is when you have a hybrid/public API that your website is using and it is also used by other clients like Powershell, Mobile, etc.… [Keep reading] “Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs”

Office 365 PowerShell and Modularised code.

5th of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I’m going to preface this article by saying “This is not a guide to resolve a specific problem, but rather a discussion on how to work through a problem/issue which requires a script to resolve”.

Often when you first look at some of these problems they seem incredibly difficult and you can rapidly end up down a rabbit hole you didn’t intend to. (I was going to quote Yoda during the Dark Side cave scene in Empire Strikes Back, but decided against proving myself to be of a certain techie stereotype.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 PowerShell and Modularised code.”

PowerShell and Office 365

2nd of November, 2014 / / No Comments

While there is a plethora of articles written about PowerShell, Hey, Scripting Guy!, where I regularly seem to end up at while trying to figure out how to do something new/different, I’m often asked about PowerShell when I’m working with customers. You see, if you’re like me, you’ve spent most of your IT life working in a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It’s comfortable, it’s often intuitive and you can click around ’till you find what you’re looking for if you’re not entirely sure.… [Keep reading] “PowerShell and Office 365”

ADFS Metadata Conversion for Shibboleth

31st of October, 2014 / / No Comments

I recently blogged about the issues integrating Shibboleth Service Providers with ADFS. As an update to that blog one of Kloud’s super smart developers (Alexey Shcherbak) has re-written the FEMMA ADFS2Fed.py Python script in PowerShell, removing the need for Python and the LXML library! The ADFS2Fed converts ADFS metadata for consumption by a Shibboleth SP. Below is the output of Alexey’s labour, awesome work Alexey!

[code language=”PowerShell” gutter=”false”]
$idpUrl = "https://federation.contoso.com";
$scope = "contoso.com";
$filename = ((Split-Path -parent $PSCommandPath) +"\federationmetadata.xml");… [Keep reading] “ADFS Metadata Conversion for Shibboleth”

How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions

27th of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Today’s a great day to be looking to move services to the public cloud in Australia with Microsoft announcing the availability of their local Microsoft Azure Australian Geography.

… [Keep reading] “How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions”

Unable to Administer Office 365 Using PowerShell with Multi-Factor Authentication

3rd of August, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Back in February, Microsoft announced the release of multi-factor authentication.  This feature allows IT administrators to dramatically increase the security of Office 365 by requiring a second factor of authentication to access the service.  This feature is very simple to configure and use.  It is far simpler to configure multi-factor authentication for Office 365 than it is to enable an equivalent solution on premises.  To learn more about multi-factor authentication, I recommend the following blog post:

http://blog.kloud.com.au/2014/04/16/protect-your-identity-in-the-cloud-with-multi-factor-authentication/… [Keep reading] “Unable to Administer Office 365 Using PowerShell with Multi-Factor Authentication”

Static DIP Request, VIP Reservation on Microsoft Azure

18th of July, 2014 / / No Comments

 

Firstly, what is Azure VIP (Virtual IP address) and DIP (internal IP address assigned by Azure DHCP) on Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure VM has two known IP addresses:

  • VIP: Public IP address pointing to Azure Cloud Service where VM is deployed. Every Cloud Service has a VIP and every Cloud Service can have several VMs. A VIP assigned to Cloud Service won’t be released until last VM on that Cloud Service is Stopped (De-allocated)
    or Deleted
  • DIP: Internal IP address assigned to the VM by Azure DHCP.
… [Keep reading] “Static DIP Request, VIP Reservation on Microsoft Azure”

Downloading Azure Friday videos from Channel 9 with one line of PowerShell

23rd of May, 2014 / / No Comments

As it’s Friday, I’ve set myself the challenge of downloading all the Azure Friday videos from the Channel 9 website with a single line of PowerShell. If you’re not familiar with this fantastic series, Scott Hanselman talks to the actual engineers who build Microsoft Azure to discuss cloud development in small bite-sized episodes. It’s great, and soon you’ll be able to watch it offline from the comfort of your own mobile device.

Here goes.

First, I’ll need to get a catalogue of all the video titles and their corresponding download links. … [Keep reading] “Downloading Azure Friday videos from Channel 9 with one line of PowerShell”