Locks can be used to prevent accidental deletion of Azure Resources. But what happens when you remove a lock to perform maintenance and forget to reapply it? Azure Automation and PowerShell can be used to make sure locks are reapplied. For an introduction to Azure Locks, check out my previous post on Azure Resource …

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Taking a snapshot of a disk is often a useful precaution before making a big change to an Azure VM. However, it’s easy for them to get forgotten about and remain on your account eating up budget. This PowerShell snippet will find old Snapshots in your subscription. 1Get-AzSnapshot | 2 Where-Object {$_.TimeCreated -lt …

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Stopped, but not deallocated, Azure VMs still cost you money. This article looks at how we can find those servers using PowerShell. When an Azure VM is shutdown using the operating system it enters a “stopped” state. In this state the server is not running but the compute resource is still being held by Azure so you …

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Azure Lab Services is a very cost-effective way of provisioning hands-on lab environments for classes, but you need to keep an eye on the admin costs which may be invisible to the lab owners. The expected expenditure made on student sessions is clearly shown in the Azure Lab Services site, but the small print mentions …

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A 30 second guide to manually patching the OMIGOD vulnerability (September 2021) in Azure-hosted Linux Virtual Machines. In September 2021 Microsoft released patches to protect against a vulnerability in the “Open Management Infrastructure” (OMI) package often installed on Linux VMs, particularly those hosted in Azure. …

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If you run WebApps in Azure you may have recently received a notification that PHP 7.3 will shortly become unsupported. This post shows how to find and update those apps. Alert This is the notification received from Microsoft. You’re receiving this email because you may be using a PHP 7.3 app on App Service. Because …

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Have you ever thought you had accidentally deleted a VM, or removed a production resource when you thought you were working in the test environment? Azure Locks are for you! What are Azure Locks? There are two types of Azure Resource Locks: ReadOnly and DoNotDelete and their names are fairly self explanatory. A VM with …

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Ever had an incident where you think “we could have resolved this quicker if we’d have spotted that X was happening”? Automated alerts can help. When you have an incident, when something goes wrong, obviously you need to fix the service and get it running again. It’s also important to try and establish the root cause …

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One solution to Website backups failing with “Timeout expired” Symptoms An Azure WebApp site was configured to backup using the built-in backup config. This had been working fine on a daily basis and then one day just started failing. Subsequent backups also failed indicating it was not a transient error, but other …

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Ubuntu 16.04 is going End Of Life at the end of April 2021, so without a paid-for subscription there won’t be any new security updates. We can use a couple of methods in PowerShell to list affected VMs in a tenancy. Method 1: Image-based Virtual machines VMs built from images are the easier target - we can quickly look …

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