Posts made by AVI-NetworkGuy

I'm on my phone so I'm keeping this short until tomorrow morning, but I would love to have a session on a PKI deep dive. I think a lot of smaller shops (mine included) could benefit from this. Like it isn't something only for big companies. Simple two tier infrastructure could work for most applications at our size quite nicely. Just a first idea.;-)

@Dashrender I'm not really saying holding on to all that money is a bad thing, just that the sheer amount of it is crazy. Since I'm not a macro-econ professor\expert, I can't really know whether keeping all of that money out of circulation is a bad or good thing. That's all

@scottalanmiller said:

Norway is seeing this problem. I was speaking to locals about this and how much they have issues competing with Silicon Valley because everyone holds onto their money causing it to deteriorate rather than investing in start ups and new ideas.

Yeah, I think this is common outside of Silicon Valley, internationally. I was reading an article not too long ago about the booming startups in Palestine (probably not the safest of work environments I'd imagine, but thriving nonetheless). I'm sure they run into this as well. You've basically got the top 1% of the top 1% (Apple, Google, etc..) holding on to all the money. It's crazy. Saving for a rainy day is one thing, but hoarding GNP's-worth of money is probably not good for anyone except the hoarder. Eh.. I have to leave this stuff to the economists lol.

I'm no macro-economics expert by any stretch, but I wonder what type of global effect this has. $1.43 trillion is a lot of scratch.

http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/25/investing/us-companies-cash-hoard/index.html

@scottalanmiller Ah, so it is based on residency and not origin\destination. Interesting. I wonder what the other 46 states' agencies are doing, security-wise, that meets or exceeds DHS qualifications (and what those qualification actually are).

@scottalanmiller said:

@AVI-NetworkGuy said:

I'm back at my room.

I had a VPN "emergency" I had to deal with, and my head is POUNDING.

Oh that sucks.

Indeed it does... Have a great time tonight and I'll catch you guys tomorrow!

I'm back at my room.

I had a VPN "emergency" I had to deal with, and my head is POUNDING.

Everything seems kosher again.

Also found out a TINY bit more - there are routing issues with Time Warner and Verizon. No more details given but I'm still searching.

Just quick heads up in case you didn't know and this affects you:

http://support.godaddy.com/system-alerts/

Decent guide for this from NIST:

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/nistir-7966/nistir_7966_draft.pdf

It was a great time had by all!

Yeah they told us about this last night at the leader summit. Interesting change.

@JaredBusch It was never implied in my story that the Azure service itself was down (not sure if that's what you're trying to say here). We rely on Azure everyday for a lot of our services and have little to no problems (aside from what I wrote about above which, as you said, was an account-related issue that looks like an "outage" to my users). There are QUITE a few very real outage\performance issues with Visual Studio Online (just look at their Service Blog for evidence of that - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vsoservice/)

Anyway, the whole point of my story was to show that things can go wrong with the service and that Microsoft can be a bit painful to work with to resolve these issues. That's all

In case any of you like to maintain a local package of the latest Office build, they released the 2016 Deployment Tool for C2R configs.. Here you go! (less Googling for you lol)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49117&WT

Oh, also, I heard there was an issue with the OneDrive for Business sync client... Trying to find link to article\post...

MJF tweeted about it earlier... https://twitter.com/maryjofoley

Guess we got lucky. The version downloaded from the portal for us had all the updated clients, including Skype for Business 2016 (sans InfoPath, but we expected that).

SAM's recent Azure meltdown brought to mind a somewhat recent event we had with Azure. More specifically, with Visual Studio Online.

We're a small software development company of about 50ish employees at any given time. One of our internal source control platforms is Team Foundation Server. We tend to do a LOT of collaboration work with outside consultants and contractors. Since our TFS is inaccessible from the "Outside", Needless to say, this turns into a headache for me because I have to worry about Acceptable Use stuff, troubleshooting VPN issues, account and access issues, etc. with this "Outside" people. Visual Studio Online (essentially "TFS in the cloud") solves a lot of those issues for me. It's still not as full featured as internal TFS, but it gets the job done admirably most of the time. This leads me to my story...

We are a Silver MS partner. One of the benefits of this is having some free Azure credits. The account we used to sign up for these credits was a "Microsoft account". Those of you who are familiar with this know that there are two kinds of accounts in Microsoft's world - the aforementioned "Microsoft account", and the "Organizational or Work account" (this is essentially your Azure AD account synced from on-prem.) Since we adopted VS Online before the service was "hooked into" Organizational Account login, our account was tied to Microsoft account. At the time, there was no way to mix and match these (there is a way now... sort of.. that's another story for another time lol).

Anyway, I called MS subscription support (as per some conversion documentation on TechNet) to get our account "changed over" to an Organizational account. The woman I spoke with said that it was all taken care of and indeed everything seemed to be fine. Until two weeks later...

Help Desk ticket came in saying that no one can log into VS Online. Sure enough, I verified that we no longer had VS Online in our Azure Subscription (what the HOLY f&$&^???). Where was it?!? Did all my VS Projects just vanish? So, I called support and after almost TWO whole days, we found out that the conversion was never fully done and that they set the old account to expire (which it did, thus the inability to login and the missing VS instance in Azure).

LUCKILY, nothing was actually gone. Once we re-added the instance to the proper subscription, the projects were all back. I still had to re-assign VS subscriptions to each user (what a pain in the ass that was!) in order to get them back up and running again, but everything was back to normal.

So yeah, that was my Azure Anecdote. Sorry for the lack of brevity lol.

And here is a video of it from last year...

http://1drv.ms/1FaHNYG

Glad to see you on here, @Chris !!!