Tag Archives: PowerShell

Exchange

Exchange 2016 CU9 and Exchange 2013 CU20 released

Leave a comment

On March 20, 2018 Microsoft has released two new quarterly updates:

  • Exchange 2016 Cumulative Update 9 (CU9)
  • Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 20 (CU20)

There aren’t too many new features in these CUs. The most important ‘feature’ is that TLS 1.2 is now fully supported (most likely you already have TLS 1.2 only on your load balancer). This is extremely supported since Microsoft will support TLS 1.2 ONLY in Office 365 in the last quarter of this year (see the An Update on Office 365 Requiring TLS 1.2 Microsoft blog as well).

Support for .NET Framework 4.7.1, or the ongoing story about the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework 4.7.1 is fully supported by Exchange 2016 CU9 and Exchange 2013 CU20. Why is this important? For the upcoming CUs in three months (somewhere in June 2018) the .NET Framework 4.7.1 is mandatory, so you need these to be installed in order to install these upcoming CUs.

Please note that .NET Framework 4.7 is NOT supported!

If you are currently running an older CU of Exchange, for example Exchange 2013 CU12, you have to make an intermediate upgrade to Exchange 2013 CU15. Then upgrade to .NET Framework 4.6.2 and then upgrade to Exchange 2013 CU20. If you are running Exchange 2016 CU3 or CU4, you can upgrade to .NET Framework 4.6.2 and then upgrade to Exchange 2016 CU9.

Schema changes

If you are coming from a recent Exchange 2013 CU, there are no schema changes since the schema version (rangeUpper = 15312) hasn’t changed since Exchange 2013 CU7. However, since there can be changes in (for example) RBAC, it’s always a good practice to run the Setup.exe /PrepareAD command. For Exchange 2016, the schema version (rangeUpper = 15332) hasn’t changed since Exchange 2016 CU7.

As always, check the new CUs in your lab environment before installing into your production environment. If you are running Exchange 2013 or Exchange 2016 in a DAG, use the PowerShell commands as explained in my earlier EXCHANGE 2013 CU17 AND EXCHANGE 2016 CU6 blog.

More information and downloads

PowerShell

Azure Active Directory PowerShell v2

1 Comment

Maybe you’ve already heard about Microsoft Graph and the Graph API. Microsoft Graph is the way resources in the Microsoft cloud are connected to each other. The Graph API is an API you can use to access Microsoft Graph, and browse (or traverse) through all the resources.

image

You can use the Graph API when building your own applications, but Microsoft is moving all their apps, tools etc. to the Graph API as well.

Azure Active Directory PowerShell v2 is moving from the Azure AD API’s to the Graph API as well. This automatically implies that Azure AD PowerShell v2 comes with new cmdlets and new options. The output of these cmdlets should be similar of course (creating a new domain, group or user in Azure Active Directory), but that these cmdlets are in no way compatible with the old Azure AD PowerShell.

Unfortunately, you have no choice then moving to Azure AD PowerShell v2. The existing PowerShell v1 will of course be supported for quite some time as it is impossible for everyone to convert their processes, cmdlets, scripts etc. from one version to another.

Note. We’ve seen similar when Microsoft moved from Azure ASM to Azure ARM. It has been taken years for Microsoft to move everything to ARM, so no worries for end-of-support scenarios anytime soon.

Installing Azure AD PowerShell v2 is easy, just install the module using the Install-Module command. This will download the module from the PowerShell repository. 

Install-Module AzureAD

When executed you will receive a notification about an untrusted repository. Click [Y] or [A] to continue. The module will be downloaded and installed.

image

image

image

You can use the following commands to store the credentials of your Office 365 and/or Azure tenant administrator account and use it to login to Azure Active Directory:

$AzureADCred = Get-Credential &lt;your tenant admin&gt;<p>Connect-AzureAD -Credential $AzureADCred

image

You’ve now installed the Azure Active Directory PowerShell v2 module and are logged on to your tenant. If you want to retrieve a list of all new v2 PowerShell commands use can use the Get-Command command:

Get-Command *AzureAD*

image

In future blogposts I will continue with the Azure AD PowerShell v2 module.

More information

<updated on March 21, 2018>

Office365

Exchange Online PowerShell multi factor authentication (MFA)

Leave a comment

It’s a good thing to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Office 365 administrators. For web based management portals this is not a problem, just enter your username and password, wait for the text message to arrive, enter it in the additional dialog box and you’re in.

For PowerShell this has been more difficult, but MFA for PowerShell is available as well for some time now. When you login to the Exchange Admin Center and select hybrid in the navigation pane you can configure a hybrid environment (first option) or install and configure the Exchange Online PowerShell MFA module.

Click on the second configure button, and in the pop-up box that appears click Open to start the installation of the PowerShell module:

image

Continue reading Exchange Online PowerShell multi factor authentication (MFA) →

PowerShell

Resolve-DnsName PowerShell command

Leave a comment

Every now and then you find these small little things that turn out to be very useful. The Resolve-DnsName cmdlet in PowerShell is such a brilliant thing, and it is a nice replacement for NSLOOKUP. Since it is a PowerShell cmdlet you can easily use it in scripts. It looks like this command was introduced in Windows Server 2012 R2, but I found out only a couple of days ago.

As an Exchange consultant I can use the Resolve-DnsName for retrieving my MX records, or my DMARC record:

image

Using the Get-Help Resolve-DnsName command you can get more information, if you need some examples on how to use it you can use the -Examples option, or the -Detailed and -Full options.

image

Very useful for an Exchange admin, and it can be used in PowerShell scripts.

PowerShell

Rename filenames containing strange characters with PowerShell

Leave a comment

Recently I had a computer with tons of file on it which I had to backup and upload to OneDrive for Business (OdfB). For some unknown reason there were lots of file that had the HTML representation of a space character in it (%20), there were also filenames containing a # character.

Needless to say, the OdfB client didn’t like it, and kept complaining about not being able to upload files, it wanted to try again and again…. Renaming these files (in hundreds of directories) was not something I fancied, but this is great for PowerShell to figure out.

To find all files that contained the %20 in it I used the following command: 

Dir -Recurse | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "*%20*" }

image

Now it’s just a matter of renaming the “%20” with another character, for example an underscore character “_”, like this: 

Dir -Recurse | Where-Object {$_.Name -like "*%20*" } | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.Name -replace "%20","_" }

Et voila, all “%20” characters are now removed from the filenames, and ready to be uploaded to OneDrive for Business

image