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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The global pandemic of 2020 caused a lot of previously in-person events to go online. This means that even more events are now accessible to a global audience, and often at times that can fit around your work and home schedules. Here’s some upcoming tech events for May 2021. There’s some big events on in May- Microsoft …

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At Microsoft Ignite Spring 2021 it was announced that Windows Admin Center was now available for Azure VMs through the portal. This post covers how to configure that new feature in PowerShell. For the Admin Center to work we need two things - firstly we need to enable access from the machine accessing the portal to the …

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Azure Key Vaults now enforce a Soft-Delete feature to prevent accidental deletion. This post discusses how to use Policy to control the associated retention period. Soft Delete allows you to recover a key vault and secrets for the duration of the retention period. Once Soft Delete is enabled, which now happens when the …

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