Archive for category: Frontpage Article

If you are remote and want to manage Active Directory from a computer that is not part of the AD domain.

VPN into the office
For Windows 10/11, add “RSAT: Active Directory Domain Services and Lightweight Directory Services Tool” to Windows. This is an Optional Feature in Windows so if you go to Optional Features you should be able to find it and add it.

Go to command line and change directory to C:\windows\system32

Run the following command

runas /netonly /user:User@Domain.Whatever “mmc dsa.msc /domain=Domain.Whatever”

Where user@Domain.Whatever is a domain user with domain admin privileges so if the user is John and the domain is domain.local, that would be John@Domain.local
Domain.Whatever would be Domain.local in the example above.

How to schedule a daily reboot or shutdown and at a certain time using command line / command prompt.  Applies to Windows 10/11

Below is an example of scheduling a shut down of a computer, daily at 6PM.

schtasks /create /sc daily /tn ShutdownAt6PM /tr “shutdown -s -f -t 2” /st 18:00 /NP

schtasks, command to schedule tasks.  the AT command that used to be with earlier versions of Windows has been deprecated

/create, To create a new task

/sc, to schedule frequency.  like once or daily.

/tn, name of the task.  this is a description

/tr, this is the command to schedule like “Shutdown -s -f -t 2”. -s to shutdown, -f to force shutdown, -t 2 to delay by 2 seconds.  The -s can be replaced by -r to reboot instead of shutdown.

/st, this is the time to execute the command.

/NP to run the schedule account on the Windows computers regardless whether the user is logged in or not.

The following are the outgoing IP addresses and networks of Microsft Office 365 SMTP/Email in case you need to know to white-list in your antispam or firewalls:

52.100.0.0/14
40.92.0.0/15
40.107.0.0/16
104.47.0.0/17
2a01:111:f403::/48
2a01:111:f400::/48

Office 365 Mailbox Migration Status Stuck Syncing

We had a mailbox that wouldn’t complete migrating from a hybrid setup with on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2013 Server to Office 365. We’ve cancelled the migration several time and restarted it but it always got hung up at the end without completing, with status Syncing or InProgress… left it even for days and wouldn’t complete

We’ve found out that some corruption in the calendar ACLs that was causing the issue… Office 365 portal wouldn’t show any message about corruption or skipped items….

We connected to Office 365 through PowerShell and issued the following commands which would approved skipped items (that we never prompted to approve in the migration using the browser which was odd, then the 2nd command would complete it)

Set-MigrationBatch  -Identity  TypeNameOfTheBatchHere  -ApproveSkippedItems
Complete-MigrationBatch  -Identity  TypeNameOfTheBatchHere

In Office 365 two factor authentication (2FA), App Password is used for older versions of Microsoft Outlook or for non Microsoft email clients on devices like MACs or smart phones.

After enforcing 2FA in Office 365 and if you are trying to configure Outlook 2016 for email, and Outlook keeps rejecting the password that you have been using and that works with OWA, while if you try the App Password it works in Outlook, then you might want to add a registry key to enable and enforce Modern Authentication.

Make sure Modern Authentication is turned on on the Office 365 Portal.  Login as admin, expand Settings, click Org Settings, Select Modern Authentication and turn it on.

• Outlook 2010 doesn’t support Modern Authentication

• Outlook 2013 supports Modern Authentication but you need to add the following two registry keys.  DWORD and set to 1.

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Identity\EnableADAL

HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Identity\Version

The following key will enforce it.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\AlwaysUseMSOAuthForAutoDiscover

• Outlook 2016 supports modern authentication and it is ON by default but we’ve had to enforce it in some instances because Outlook kept prompting for a password and wouldn’t take the password that worked with OWA but Outlook worked with App Password.  Enforcing Modern Authentication made Outlook 2016 accept the regular office 365 password (that worked OWA password).   Add the following DWORD and set to 1

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Exchange\AlwaysUseMSOAuthForAutoDiscover

Note: registry changes might result in problems and serious issues with computers and software.  Do it at your own risk.