Adventures in IT Administration

In this article, I describe my solution to going from nothing to a fully configured Windows Server VM in Azure. I'll explain the process of configuring Azure Automation accounts, DSC resources, and constructing the script that makes use of both. Read on for more! As I was setting up VM's in Azure for another article, I found that I was unsatisfied with how slow setting up VM's in Azure was. I wanted to have a short prompt and then deploy a VM from zero to a configured role-installed Microsoft Server, ready for use. Before setting off to the solution i'm about to describe, I scoured the internet looking for solutions that had already been done (like I discovered with Lability while creating my VM automation tool, argh!). But this time, the only thing I saw was either automating the creation of the VM, or automating the configurations of the VM after it was already created.  The following setup will allow the user to input a couple of parameters in a function and ha...

In this article, I attempt to describe how to get started with Powershell Desired State Configuration for complete beginners. I'll walk through the basic parts of what is required to use DSC, and how to implement it in a small example. Read on for more. 7/7/2018 Update : The references I'd used when I wrote this were a bit outdated. Since then, WMF has been updated to 5.0 which means a lot of the resources were updated. For the more current version of the pull server configuration for the DSCServer1 example, please see below: You'll have to use the new xPSDesiredStateConfiguration modules new references to properly build if you're installing on vanilla Windows Server today. Ultimately the code I used to get the pull server working in my latest environment was: First i had to create a new self-signed cert: New-SelfSignedCertificate -CertStoreLocation 'CERT:\LocalMachine\MY' -DnsName "DSCPullCert" -OutVariable DSCCert T...

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC for short), is an extremely efficient way of managing access to resources for users based on their role. For example, a person with the title Payroll Clerk would have completely different resource permissions than someone with, say, the title of Engineering Manager. This article aims to describe the benefits, the use cases, and the implementation of Role-Based Access Control.  Read on for more. The basics of Role-based access revolves around the concept of least-privilege access. Or more simply, granting only as much access as the user in a specific role needs. By defining the roles, assigning the roles a specific access to specific resources, and then assigning users into those roles, you can dramatically reduce confusion and security overhead. When it comes to active directory, the important part to remember is the "directory". At the core, it's a listing of objects and information about them. It organizes objects into neat little ca...