Dev, Cloud and Stuff!
Category: Security
I know you shouldn’t try and subvert your companies internal security policies, but sometimes the security department just don’t seem to understand the consequences of what they do…especially when using multiple computers simultaneously!
The following script essentially presses the inaccessible F15 key at regular time intervals to ensure the screen timeout is reset and you avoid locking out.
Continue reading “Keeping your managed PC from locking all the time”The following are instructions for setting up a connection to an Active Directory (AD) Domain secured SQL Server using either SQL Server Management Studio or Visual Studio. This is especially applicable when not using a domain attached PC.
Continue reading “How to connect to an AD Domain Secured SQL Server from a non-domain PC”
I have recently been trying to program against the Azure Active Directory (AAD) using the Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient library. Unfortunately this library literally has no useful comments to assist understanding or clarify parameters etc.. Let alone how best to use or implement objects and methods or what and why exception may occur.
Equally the MSDN documentation seems to be lacking in any examples and really has minimal comments (although I see it’s getting a bit better…I think).
To this end I have created a ‘wrapper / handler’ to simplify all sorts of AAD interactions called AADGraphHandler. It effectively will help manage the creation of the ActiveDirectoryClient and a bunch of it’s operations. You can find this on GitHub at https://github.com/nrogoff/AADGraphHandler
You can get access to the ActiveDirectoryClient directly, and so any methods not covered yet. (e.g. Adding and removing roles to a user. Just not needed it yet!)
Continue reading “Azure Active Directory Graph API Wrapper to help make it a bit easier!”
It’s very frustrating that IE will never prompt you again for saving details to a website once you have said ‘No’ in this prompt (in IE 9 it’s a bar along the bottom on the window!)
The easiest, but most destruction method of fixing this is to wipe all you form data using the options in IE.
However, I have found two good blogs that explain why and how to fix it without loosing all your other login details etc..
Firstly , a manual registry fix is explained here at watchingthenet.com. Using the registry editor you can do a three stage process to fix just the one website you have the problem with.
Secondly, there is this one by Eric Law that explains why it’s a bit tricky to resolve due to the secure storing of the form data and settings. Most importantly is that he has very kindly made a little utility that help you fix it for just one website at a time.
You need to put in the actual page address, not the domain. Best to go to the offending login page that is refusing to remember and copy the address directly.
After installing SQL Server 2008 R2 on a Windows 2008 server you will need to configure the firewall (if it’s turned on!) to allow access to the SQL server. Here is the simple method using the interface and assumes the following:
That will enable inbound connections to your SQL Server. If you are also enabling SQL Browser Service then you will need to add UDP Port 1434 too another inbound rule.
If you have more than one instance of SQL then you will need to set the port and create rules for them.
For full details on ports and setting it up go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc646023(v=SQL.105).aspx
In Windows 7 (actually any of the latest Windows releases) you will find that files copied to your local drives are not trusted until you right-click on them and in the properties click the ‘Unblock’ button. This is all very well for one or two files, but gets extremely tedious with more. It turns out to be related to NTFS’s ability to allow alternate data streams.
So here is a simple method of mass or bulk unblocking files.