Over the years, dozens of group policies for Windows Update have accumulated, many of which no longer work or have been deprecated by Microsoft. Due to a lack of documentation, many admins haven't been aware they are using outdated settings. The company has now clarified the situation in a blog post.

The post Microsoft retires 25 group policies for Windows Update first appeared on 4sysops.

SoftEther VPN is an open-source VPN solution that offers a wide range of authentication and connectivity options for multiple operating systems. It can also be used with mobile devices running iPadOS, IOS, Android, and Windows Mobile operating systems.

The post Set up a VPN server on Windows with SoftEther and connect clients first appeared on 4sysops.

Microsoft has extended the Authenticator app to store passwords and other data for web-based forms, such as credit card numbers. In combination with the Edge browser or Chrome plus an extension and a Microsoft account, the Authenticator can be used as a password manager.

The post How to use Microsoft Authenticator as a password manager first appeared on 4sysops.

The OneDrive client synchronizes files between the local computer and the cloud. Sometimes, it can happen that this synchronization does not work properly. You then have a different file status on the PC than in OneDrive. Resetting the OneDrive client usually solves this problem.

The post Reset OneDrive synchronization first appeared on 4sysops.

In this post, we will be looking at purging options to permanently delete a Key Vault and fully erase all the secrets, keys, and certificates in it. Sometimes destroying data properly is as important as keeping it secure. We all know that there are some cases in which the data is actually not deleted completely, even if we think it is. Key Vaults in Azure are a good example of this.

The post Permanently delete a Key Vault in Azure using PowerShell first appeared on 4sysops.

Usbipd-win is an open-source project that allows sharing locally connected USB devices with other machines, including Hyper-V guests and WSL 2. It provides access to USB devices by using network connectivity over TCP port 3240.

The post Usbipd-win: Access and share USB devices in Hyper-V VMs and WSL first appeared on 4sysops.

Many legacy systems don't offer REST APIs and no way to interact with them programmatically. Microsoft Power Automate for Desktop (PAD) is a free solution that enables automating manual and repetitive tasks without the need to use a programming language. The easiest option is to record user actions in macros.

The post Record actions and create workflows with Power Automate for Desktop (PAD) first appeared on 4sysops.

When joining a device to Azure AD, you may receive the following error message:

Something went wrong. It looks like we can't connect to the URL for your organization's MDM terms of use. Try again, or contact your system administrator with the problem information from this page.

The post Joining Azure AD fails—Can't connect to URL for your organization's MDM terms first appeared on 4sysops.

After Microsoft released security patches for two Active Directory vulnerabilities with the Tuesday, November 9, 2021 patch, Microsoft urged customers on December 20 to apply the patches immediately to prevent attackers from taking over Windows domains. In addition to patching, organizations can increase their defenses against attacks by executing a couple of actions that will help prevent the unauthorized creation of accounts. Unauthorized accounts could lead to the elevation of privileges to those of a Domain Admin once a regular user account has been compromised. An event like this can simply be regarded as an escalated attack.

The post Exploiting the CVE-2021-42278 (sAMAccountName spoofing) and CVE-2021-42287 (deceiving the KDC) Active Directory vulnerabilities first appeared on 4sysops.

The Windows PowerShell script I introduce here detects brute force Remote Desktop attacks and blocks them in the Windows Firewall.

The post Block brute force Remote Desktop attacks with Windows PowerShell first appeared on 4sysops.

In this article, I outline why I chose the Go programming language over PowerShell, Python, and JavaScript for my DevOps projects.

The post Go vs. PowerShell, Python, and JavaScript for DevOps first appeared on 4sysops.

Potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) are software apps that do things that border on malicious activity. These can include displaying unwanted advertising when you search for specific terms, redirecting your browser home page, secretly using your computer for crypto mining, or installing unwanted browser plugins. Microsoft has included blocking PUAs in Windows 10 and 11. Admins can manage this feature using PowerShell or Group Policy.

The post Configure protection against potentially unwanted apps using PowerShell or Group Policy first appeared on 4sysops.

In our previous poll, I asked how many of you are planning to deploy Windows 11 to end users in 2022. The result more or less meets my expectations. Only a few organizations have concrete plans to upgrade to Windows 11.

The post Result of the Windows 11 poll—Only very few admins want to upgrade first appeared on 4sysops.

If you have to deploy several virtual machines together with their resources to multiple Azure resource groups, you can use nested templates with my PowerShell script.

The post Using nested templates and a PowerShell script to deploy multiple Azure resource groups with virtual machines and supporting resources first appeared on 4sysops.

With the release of Windows 11, many are starting to test the OS on virtual machines. VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere are popular options for this. Since Microsoft has raised the hardware requirements for Windows 11, these must also be met in a virtual environment. The most significant hurdle is the need for a virtual Trusted Platform Module (TPM). This is why you can't officially run the OS on VirtualBox.

The post Install Windows 11 in a VM on VMware Workstation or ESXi first appeared on 4sysops.

If you attach an EBS volume to an Amazon EC2 instance, you can configure its device name. However, the block device driver of newer Linux kernels might randomly assign a different name. In this AWS guide, you will learn how to edit the fstab configuration file to ensure that an EBS volume automatically mounts on the correct mount point.

The post Automatically mount an NVMe EBS volume in an EC2 Linux instance using fstab first appeared on 4sysops.

Repairing, migrating, and exporting Exchange Server data can be challenging. Learn how the Stellar Toolkit for Exchange can make these tasks much easier.

The post Stellar Toolkit for Exchange: Repair database , Migrate to Microsoft 365, , export mailboxes first appeared on 4sysops.

In this guide, I show you how to install Boto3, the AWS SDK for Python, in Microsoft's free Visual Studio Code (VS Code) on a Windows machine. This will allow you to automate in Amazon's cloud with the most popular scripting language on the planet.

The post Install Boto3 (AWS SDK for Python) in Visual Studio Code (VS Code) on Windows first appeared on 4sysops.

PSReadLine is a module created by Microsoft to customize the command line editing environment in PowerShell. It offers numerous customizations that can change how your command line editor presents data in many ways.

The post Getting started with the PSReadLine module for PowerShell first appeared on 4sysops.