This week I presented a Festive Tech Calendar 2021 session about Azure Resource Manager Locks. This post includes a link to the session recording and some accompanying resources. Session Azure Resource Manager Locks are a valuable tool in protecting those Resources Santa brought you from accidental deletion. In this …

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This week I received notification that my Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) certification was due to expire in 180 days, and I took the opportunity to renew it using the free online renewals process. Notification The email arrived 6 months before the certification was due to expire, giving me plenty of time to …

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December 2021 sees the return of the month-long Festive Tech Calendar with a whole host of content being released every day. There’s loads of exciting things happening in this month-long extravaganza with videos, blogs, quizzes, podcasts, and activities to entertain and educate. Topics include Azure, Teams and Viva, …

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A video short for the upcoming Microsoft Ignite 2021 event happening November 2–4, 2021 where I talk briefly about my first computing experience- a Sinclair ZX81.

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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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