Tag: Notes from the Field

One time, I had a phone call from the ISP for the company I was working at and they said they did a firewall scan without notifying us. Ok, thanks for that, but next time, be honest and let us know when you are going to perform a penetration test and we’ll be happy to

Any time I’m heading out to lunch and see a back hoe digging, I think ‘cable breaker’. Sure enough, ran into a customer, they had 200’ of fiber torn up as the street was being worked on during construction. I think it’s a rule/law to note wherever a gas line is buried in the ground.

Was helping a customer the other day and the topic of what to name your DAG (Exchange Database Availability Group) was presented. One thought is to just name it ‘DAG’. Works well, but the issue is, when migrating from Exchange Server 2010 to Exchange Server 2013, or 2010 to 2016, or 2013 to 2019, etc.

Story 1: One day, a maintenance worker went downstairs to perform some work in the company’s data center. He walked up to the door, saw a big red button, with no label, and assumed it was the way to open the door. Why not have automatic doors that need a button? He pushed it, the

Sometimes you must store a password for an account in a PowerShell script file. One option is to leverage the ConvertTo-SecureStringcmdlet. By running this cmdlet on a machine, with a specific password, a secure string is generated. You put that value into your file, and then you can run a ConvertFrom-SecureSting to run the script securely. However, I

I was interviewed for a ‘RunAs Radio’ episode which was posted on August 29, 2019 with a 30 minute discussion about stories from the field. Ready for a chuckle? Richard chats with Mike O'Neill about a number of stories from his work as a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft. While it's best to always be kind, some