Konstantin Kaminskiy - KonTheCat's Box

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Konstantin Kaminskiy

Save the time: a guide for the manager of the mildly competent.

You have found yourself managing the mildly competent. You are busy. Doing new things is hard. But it’s ok, this will be mostly a list of things to not do. The only new thing you will need to do here is to be mildly more aware of yourself and

Dynamic DNS in Azure v2: Heartbeat logs, Logic Apps, KQL - a concept

Dynamic DNS in Azure v2: Heartbeat logs, Logic Apps, KQL - a concept

TL; DR - We take real public IP data from heartbeat logs of VM Insights. We also use Logic Apps to add in tag data, which connects computers with hostnames, as well as Azure DNS data, which gives us the DNS IPs for hostnames. Where we find that the heartbeat

Azure virtual network gateway can forward spoke-hub-spoke traffic, etc.

Why this? Glad you asked, several reasons: 1. Studying for the AZ-700, the Azure networking exam, and figured I would do myself that which seems to have the status of slightly more complicated than hello-world in the Azure networking realm - user defined routing, traffic between spoke vNets through a

Private DNS in Azure - It's always DNS

It's Always DNS As system administrators well know, DNS matters. If you doubt this, just Google "It's always DNS" and you will find no shortage of r/sysadmin stories explaining how it is always DNS. This does not change in Azure, especially if your Azure environment still includes Active Directory.

Microsoft Certifications: Why and How

Establishing Credibility - or Why Should I Listen to This Guy? I think you should read this if you have some interest in getting Microsoft certifications, especially if you are at the start of your certification journey, or you are not getting certs as quickly as you would like to,

Dynamic DNS with Azure Automation Runbook Hybrid Worker

Dynamic DNS with Azure Automation Runbook Hybrid Worker

TL;DR Here we use an Azure Automation Hybrid worker to execute a runbook on a local computer whose public IP address we want to use to update an A record in Azure DNS. The main advantage of this approach is the monitoring and manageability one gets in effect for

Where is InvocationId in Azure Function PowerShell v2?

Short version: For the v1 runtime, there is a nice document that describes where this is. https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-host/wiki/Retrieving-information-about-the-currently-running-function For the v2 runtime, there was no such luck. After looking at the environment variables and just the variables available when running the function I found it

Schedule Disabling Azure AD User with a Logic App

Schedule disabling an Azure AD user with a Logic App!

A tale of Backup Vault deletion

So I had a backup vault that was backing up an Azure Files share. From the Portal I removed the share a protected item, so the backup vault now had no protected items. So now I should be able to delete the vault, right? Nope. So I took a look

Monitoring the Office 365 Audit Log - For MSPs (Legacy)

Note: With the changes to security requirements for Microsoft partners this solution is no longer feasible, as it relies on being able to authenticate into an account that has delegated admin access to client tenants without MFA. It will be kept around for demonstration purposes. Does this sound too familiar?

Exception calling “Execute” with “1” argument(s): “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” – Add-StorageTableRow error

Google searches for the error lead down the path of errors with Azure tools. This was not the issue for me. The issue for me was that some of the keys in the hashtable I was using to submit the other entity properties were null. Below is the code for

Azure Storage Tables & PowerShell – Issues encountered

Here are some issues I have run into that I have not found clear answers for elsewhere: * Do not attempt to use the Azure timestamp property in filters, make your own. * If you are sending a hash table make sure all the keys have data. If you do not you