Weeknote 2024/03: missing cyclocross; digitally transforming my family; installing Ethernet and much, much more

Another week has flown by – this time I kept notes to keep track of it all in the hope it would speed up the weeknote writing. It didn’t, so I need to work on the format. Anyway, this is how it looks this week.

My week at work

Understandably, I can’t write much about what I do in the day job. Suffice to say, it’s been busy, busy, busy. I’m preparing for a presentation to the Node4 Go To Market (GTM) team next week. This will be me, along with my colleague Bjoern, presenting to the entire salesforce and trying to convince them why they should be selling more of the services we’re responsible for. And, in parallel, I’m refreshing the collateral to support the sales of those same services.

I also spent some time on a call with one of our business partner this week, learning more about how they are developing their offers and how we can potentially do more work together.

My week in cycling

I know, this blog is supposed to be about tech, but I also have two very sporty teenagers that I’m very proud of. Their sports activities are a big part of my week (and my life in general).

Last weekend, I should have been in Falkirk, supporting my eldest son, Matt, at the 2024 British National Cyclocross Championships. As things transpired, that was not to be…

At 2023’s National Champs (Matt’s first senior year), Cameron Mason was so dominant in the Elite/U23 Men’s race that only 7 riders were permitted to finish the race (under the 80% rule). It’s a big investment of time and money to travel the length of the country for a short race but we would have been there, if Matt felt he was ready for it. Unfortunately, after a challenging few weeks with a return to racing after spending the autumn leading cycle tours in Greece, he decided to end his cyclocross season early. Apart from podiums in the local Central Cyclocross League (CCXL), third place in the Central Regional CX Champs was to be his only significant result this season. He’s preparing to build two new bikes for the 2024/25 cyclocross season – and he has plans for the 2024 road season too. I’m sure those plans will end up in these weeknotes in due course.

Just as a side note, after the demise of GCN Plus, it’s great to see BBC Scotland providing mainstream TV coverage of the national champs!

My week in technology

Adding AirPlay to an old Hi-Fi amplifier

With a bonus weekend at home, I got to finish up a tech project that’s been on the list for a while – adding AirPlay to my old 1990s Technics amplifier. When I moved in with my wife, my mid-range Hi-Fi stack was labelled “black loud crap”. As a result, it was banished from the house, but still lives on in the Man Cave. Adding an old Raspberry Pi 2B running as an audio gateway has provided the necessary tech to cast audio, without needing to invest in more Sonos (or IKEA Symfonisk) as I have in the rest of the house. This is the guide I followed, at PiMyLifeUp.

There’s the odd stutter, which I think may be due to a weak 2.4MHz Wi-Fi signal. It could also be down to running on a relatively old Pi 2. It certainly beats connecting Spotify via Alexa which used my account and so only worked for me and not the whole family. Plus it also works with other apps, like Pocket Casts and Audible.

Wilson family digital transformation

Late last year, I convinced Mrs W that we could use the family calendar on our iPhones to manage our busy family life. Previously, the paper calendar on the kitchen wall was the single source of the truth. That’s not too helpful when we’re not at home. This digital transformation of the Wilson family has been a huge success but it’s also shown me that people use calendars in different ways!

For example, our eldest son is currently away skiing. Is that one long appointment for 2 weeks? Or do we just need to know the dates he leaves and returns? And how do we record our youngest son’s Hockey training sessions? Is it the actual session times, or the times we leave the house and return? I’m trying not to be too “Mark” about this, but it’s an interesting insight into how other people think!

On a related note, I also learned this week that not everyone sees pictures in their mind, like I do. I don’t know what they do “see”, but it explains why not everyone can visualise what something will look like when it’s finished!

AirTag all the the things

After a trial with an Apple AirTag in my luggage (very useful when it wasn’t put on the plane at Stansted one holiday), I’ve been expanding our use of these devices. One use case that’s been particularly helpful is my youngest son’s keys… as he’s already had to replace at least one set that he lost before I tagged them. Now I regularly hear the “FindMy sound” as he searches for them before leaving the house.

On a similar note, for Christmas, my eldest son bought me an Apple FindMy-compatible tracker for my glasses. It doesn’t have the Precision Finding feature of the AirTag, but it does tell me where they were last seen, and lets me play a sound. Now, when I leave them somewhere, I can listen for the chirp of the Orbit sensor. It’s a bit strange charging my glasses though, but this is relatively infrequent.

Other bits and pieces of tech

  • After seeing a thread about date formats, ISO standards and RFCs, I thought about my frustrations with people who write dates “the wrong way”. By the wrong way, I mean not putting the most significant portion first. The US convention of mm/dd/yyyy is nonsensical. UK dd/mm/yyyy is better, but I generally name files using yyyymmdd etc. because they appear in order. On that basis, I realised that my naming for these weeknotes should be year/week number (inspired by Sharon O’Dea). Previously I had erroneously named them week number/year. From this week forwards, that is corrected.
  • After watching a YouTube video, I successfully resuscitated an apparently-dead Li-ion battery pack (the on-board circuitry needed its capacity recharging before it would accept a charge). This is potentially dangerous – I’m not responsible for anything that happens if you try it, but it worked for me, and saved me quite a few quid. Some say to use a resistor for safety. Others stress to only “jump start” momentarily (as I did).
  • I was looking at some communications from Vodafone about the 3G switch off… and wondered if that is the same part of the spectrum as 4G… i.e. more channels freed up for 4G/5G or will 4G/5G have access to extra spectrum now? Twitter helped me out with that…
  • Hopefully that section between the hall (OpenReach ONT) and the garage “datacentre” (ISP router) is all the Ethernet I need to run, but I have plenty of spare cable if I need to pull any more for a potential CCTV project… (I’ve been watching lots of videos about Reolink cameras).
  • Oh yes, one more thing. I finally changed my LinkedIn profile picture… my previous professional headshot was taken when I was in my late 30s, I think. I’m nearly 52 and afraid it’s time to look my age. This may not sound like news but it took me ages to find something suitably professional that I liked!

My week in TV

I’ll spare you all my YouTube highlights this week but, over in streaming TV land, Mrs W and I wrapped up three excellent series:

  • Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV);
  • Slow Horses (Apple TV); and
  • The Crown (Netflix).

This last season of The Crown has been criticised for being too dramatic but I thought it was well done. There will be no season 7 and it feels like it was left at just the right point, at the marriage of Charles and Camilla (then Prince and Princess of Wales) and the early days of William and Katherine’s relationship (the current Prince and Princess of Wales). It even contained a nod to Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, with her involvement in the plans but also some scenes that linked to the actual events last year.

And in case we hadn’t had enough Toby Jones, we’ve started watching season 2 of Detectorists, for some light hearted relief from the more serious stuff.

Other things that should probably be a blog post on their own

I was going to write some more, but I’m getting bored of writing this now – goodness knows how you feel, dear reader. So there may need to be an overflow post or two about these topics, or maybe the tweets will say enough:

  • Well-paid IT folks moaning about the inconvenience that strikes have on their lives… playing to the “them and us” narrative.
  • Rebooting the car to get Apple CarPlay to work again!
  • CTOs with 30 years of industry experience being approached about a job that claims to need a technical degree.
  • Storytelling. And how pictures can convey messages that words alone cannot. Or bring meaning to words when they are in another language that you only have a passing knowledge of.
  • Rail fare “simplification” and the very different approaches taken by LNER (UK Government-owned) and ScotRail (Scottish Government-owned).
  • Public sector IT contracts, and the need to be a good client – it’s not all about the supplier.
  • The increasingly anti-social nature of social media.

My week in pictures

Featured image: author’s own

Microsoft Ignite | The Tour: London Recap

This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

One of the most valuable personal development activities in my early career was a trip to the Microsoft TechEd conference in Amsterdam. I learned a lot – not just technically but about making the most of events to gather information, make new industry contacts, and generally top up my knowledge. Indeed, even as a relatively junior consultant, I found that dipping into multiple topics for an hour or so gave me a really good grounding to discover more (or just enough to know something about the topic) – far more so than an instructor-led training course.

Over the years, I attended further “TechEd”s in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin. I fought off the “oh Mark’s on another jolly” comments by sharing information – incidentally, conference attendance is no “jolly” – there may be drinks and even parties but those are after long days of serious mental cramming, often on top of broken sleep in a cheap hotel miles from the conference centre.

Microsoft TechEd is no more. Over the years, as the budgets were cut, the standard of the conference dropped and in the UK we had a local event called Future Decoded. I attended several of these – and it was at Future Decoded that I discovered risual – where I’ve been working for almost four years now.

Now, Future Decoded has also fallen by the wayside and Microsoft has focused on taking it’s principal technical conference – Microsoft Ignite – on tour, delivering global content locally.

So, a few weeks ago, I found myself at the ExCeL conference centre in London’s Docklands, looking forward to a couple of days at “Microsoft Ignite | The Tour: London”.

Conference format

Just like TechEd, and at Future Decoded (in the days before I had to use my time between keynotes on stand duty!), the event was broken up into tracks with sessions lasting around an hour. Because that was an hour of content (and Microsoft event talks are often scheduled as an hour, plus 15 minutes Q&A), it was pretty intense, and opportunities to ask questions were generally limited to trying to grab the speaker after their talk, or at the “Ask the Experts” stands in the main hall.

One difference to Microsoft conferences I’ve previously attended was the lack of “level 400” sessions: every session I saw was level 100-300 (mostly 200/300). That’s fine – that’s the level of content I would expect but there may be some who are looking for more detail. If it’s detail you’re after then Ignite doesn’t seem to be the place.

Also, I noticed that Day 2 had fewer delegates and lacked some of the “hype” from Day 1: whereas the Day 1 welcome talk was over-subscribed, the Day 2 equivalent was almost empty and light on content (not even giving airtime to the conference sponsors). Nevertheless, it was easy to get around the venue (apart from a couple of pinch points).

Personal highlights

I managed to cover 11 topics over two days (plus a fair amount of networking). The track format of the event was intended to let a delegate follow a complete learning path but, as someone who’s a generalist (that’s what Architects have to be), I spread myself around to cover:

  • Dealing with a massive onset of data ingestion (Jeramiah Dooley/@jdooley_clt).
  • Enterprise network connectivity in a cloud-first world (Paul Collinge/@pcollingemsft).
  • Building a world without passwords.
  • Discovering Azure Tooling and Utilities (Simona Cotin/@simona_cotin).
  • Selecting the right data storage strategy for your cloud application (Jeramiah Dooley/@jdooley_clt).
  • Governance in Azure (Sam Cogan/@samcogan).
  • Planning and implementing hybrid network connectivity (Thomas Maurer/@ThomasMaurer).
  • Transform device management with Windows Autopilot, Intune and OneDrive (Michael Niehaus/@mniehaus and Mizanur Rahman).
  • Maintaining your hybrid environment (Niel Peterson/@nepeters).
  • Windows Server 2019 Deep Dive (Jeff Woolsey/@wsv_guy).
  • Consolidating infrastructure with the Azure Kubernetes Service (Erik St Martin/@erikstmartin).

In the past, I’d have written a blog post for each topic. I was going to say that I simply don’t have the time to do that these days but by the time I’d finished writing this post, I thought maybe I could have split it up a bit more! Regardless, here are some snippets of information from my time at Microsoft Ignite | The Tour: London. There’s more information in the slide decks – which are available for download, along with the content for the many sessions I didn’t attend.

Data ingestion

Ingesting data can be broken into:

  • Real-time ingestion.
  • Real-time analysis (see trends as they happen – and make changes to create a competitive differentiator).
  • Producing actions as patterns emerge.
  • Automating reactions in external services.
  • Making data consumable (in whatever form people need to use it).

Azure has many services to assist with this – take a look at IoT Hub, Azure Event Hubs, Azure Databricks and more.

Enterprise network connectivity for the cloud

Cloud traffic is increasing whilst traffic that remains internal to the corporate network is in decline. Traditional management approaches are no longer fit for purpose.

Office applications use multiple persistent connections – this causes challenges for proxy servers which generally degrade the Office 365 user experience. Remediation is possible, with:

  • Differentiated traffic – follow Microsoft advice to manage known endpoints, including the Office 365 IP address and URL web service.
  • Let Microsoft route traffic (data is in a region, not a place). Use DNS resolution to egress connections close to the user (a list of all Microsoft peering locations is available). Optimise the route length and avoid hairpins.
  • Assess network security using application-level security, reducing IP ranges and ports and evaluating the service to see if some activities can be performed in Office 365, rather than at the network edge (e.g. DLP, AV scanning).

For Azure:

  • Azure ExpressRoute is a connection to the edge of the Microsoft global backbone (not to a datacentre). It offers 2 lines for resilience and two peering types at the gateway – private and public (Microsoft) peering.
  • Azure Virtual WAN can be used to build a hub for a region and to connect sites.
  • Replace branch office routers with software-defined (SDWAN) devices and break out where appropriate.
Microsoft global network

Passwordless authentication

Basically, there are three options:

  • Windows Hello.
  • Microsoft Authenticator.
  • FIDO2 Keys.

Azure tooling and utilities

Useful resources include:

Selecting data storage for a cloud application

What to use? It depends! Classify data by:

  • Type of data:
    • Structured (fits into a table)
    • Semi-structured (may fit in a table but may also use outside metadata, external tables, etc.)
    • Unstructured (documents, images, videos, etc.)
  • Properties of the data:
    • Volume (how much)
    • Velocity (change rate)
    • Variety (sources, types, etc.)
Item TypeVolume Velocity Variety
Product catalogue Semi-structured High Low Low
Product photos Unstructured High Low Low
Sales data Semi-structured Medium High High

How to match data to storage:

  • Storage-driven: build apps on what you have.
  • Cloud-driven: deploy to the storage that makes sense.
  • Function-driven: build what you need; storage comes with it.

Governance in Azure

It’s important to understand what’s running in an Azure subscription – consider cost, security and compliance:

  • Review (and set a baseline):
    • Tools include: Resource Graph; Cost Management; Security Center; Secure Score.
  • Organise (housekeeping to create a subscription hierarchy, classify subscriptions and resources, and apply access rights consistently):
    • Tools include: Management Groups; Tags; RBAC;
  • Audit:
    • Make changes to implement governance without impacting people/work. Develop policies, apply budgets and audit the impact of the policies.
    • Tools include: Cost Management; Azure Policy.
  • Enforce
    • Change policies to enforcement, add resolution actions and enforce budgets.
    • Consider what will happen for non-compliance?
    • Tools include: Azure Policy; Cost Management; Azure Blueprints.
  • (Loop back to review)
    • Have we achieved what we wanted to?
    • Understand what is being spent and why.
    • Know that only approved resources are deployed.
    • Be sure of adhering to security practices.
    • Opportunities for further improvement.

Planning and implementing hybrid network connectivity

Moving to the cloud allows for fast deployment but planning is just as important as it ever was. Meanwhile, startups can be cloud-only but most established organisations have some legacy and need to keep some workloads on-premises, with secure and reliable hybrid communication.

Considerations include:

  • Extension of the internal protected network:
    • Should workloads in Azure only be accessible from the Internal network?
    • Are Azure-hosted workloads restricted from accessing the Internet?
    • Should Azure have a single entry and egress point?
    • Can the connection traverse the public Internet (compliance/regulation)?
  • IP addressing:
    • Existing addresses on-premises; public IP addresses.
    • Namespaces and name resolution.
  • Multiple regions:
    • Where are the users (multiple on-premises sites); where are the workloads (multiple Azure regions); how will connectivity work (should each site have its own connectivity)?
  • Azure virtual networks:
    • Form an isolated boundary with secure communications.
    • Azure-assigned IP addresses (no need for a DHCP server).
    • Segmented with subnets.
    • Network Security Groups (NSGs) create boundaries around subnets.
  • Connectivity:
    • Site to site (S2S) VPNs at up to 1Gbps
      • Encrypted traffic over the public Internet to the GatewaySubnet in Azure, which hosts VPN Gateway VMs.
      • 99.9% SLA on the Gateway in Azure (not the connection).
      • Don’t deploy production workloads on the GatewaySubnet; /26, /27 or /28 subnets recommended; don’t apply NSGs to the GatewaySubnet – i.e. let Azure manage it.
    • Dedicated connections (Azure ExpressRoute): private connection at up to 10Gbps to Azure with:
      • Private peering (to access Azure).
      • Microsoft peering (for Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure public IPs).
      • 99.9% SLA on the entire connection.
    • Other connectivity services:
      • Azure ExpressRoute Direct: a 100Gbps direct connection to Azure.
      • Azure ExpressRoute Global Reach: using the Microsoft network to connect multiple local on-premises locations.
      • Azure Virtual WAN: branch to branch and branch to Azure connectivity with software-defined networks.
  • Hybrid networking technologies:

Modern Device Management (Autopilot, Intune and OneDrive)

The old way of managing PC builds:

  1. Build an image with customisations and drivers
  2. Deploy to a new computer, overwriting what was on it
  3. Expensive – and the device has a perfectly good OS – time-consuming

Instead, how about:

  1. Unbox PC
  2. Transform with minimal user interaction
  3. Device is ready for productive use

The transformation is:

  • Take OEM-optimised Windows 10:
    • Windows 10 Pro and drivers.
    • Clean OS.
  • Plus software, settings, updates, features, user data (with OneDrive for Business).
  • Ready for productive use.

The goal is to reduce the overall cost of deploying devices. Ship to a user with half a page of instructions…

Windows Autopilot overview

Autopilot deployment is cloud driven and will eventually be centralised through Intune:

  1. Register device:
    • From OEM or Channel (manufacturer, model and serial number).
    • Automatically (existing Intune-managed devices).
    • Manually using a PowerShell script to generate a CSV file with serial number and hardware hash, which is then uploaded to the Intune portal.
  2. Assign Autopilot profile:
    • Use Azure AD Groups to assign/target.
    • The profile includes settings such as deployment mode, BitLocker encryption, device naming, out of box experience (OOBE).
    • An Azure AD device object is created for each imported Autopilot device.
  3. Deploy:
    • Needs Azure AD Premium P1/P2
    • Scenarios include:
      • User-driven with Azure AD:
        • Boot to OOBE, choose language, locale, keyboard and provide credentials.
        • The device is joined to Azure AD, enrolled to Intune and policies are applied.
        • User signs on and user-assigned items from Intune policy are applied.
        • Once the desktop loads, everything is present, including file links in OneDrive) – time depends on the software being pushed.
      • Self-deploying (e.g. kiosk, digital signage):
        • No credentials required; device authenticates with Azure AD using TPM 2.0.
      • User-driven with hybrid Azure AD join:
        • Requires Offline Domain Join Connector to create AD DS computer account.
        • Device connected to the corporate network (in order to access AD DS), registered with Autopilot, then as before.
        • Sign on to Azure AD and then to AD DS during deployment. If they use the same UPN then it makes things simple for users!
      • Autopilot for existing devices (Windows 7 to 10 upgrades):
        • Backup data in advance (e.g. with OneDrive)
        • Deploy generic Windows 10.
        • Run Autopilot user-driven mode (can’t harvest hardware hashes in Windows 7 so use a JSON config file in the image – the offline equivalent of a profile. Intune will ignore unknown device and Autopilot will use the file instead; after deployment of Windows 10, Intune will notice a PC in the group and apply the profile so it will work if the PC is reset in future).

Autopilot roadmap (1903) includes:

  • “White glove” pre-provisioning for end users: QR code to track, print welcome letter and shipping label!
  • Enrolment status page (ESP) improvements.
  • Cortana voiceover disabled on OOBE.
  • Self-updating Autopilot (update Autopilot without waiting to update Windows).

Maintaining your hybrid environment

Common requirements in an IaaS environment include wanting to use a policy-based configuration with a single management and monitoring solution and auto-remediation.

Azure Automation allows configuration and inventory; monitoring and insights; and response and automation. The Azure Portal provides a single pane of glass for hybrid management (Windows or Linux; any cloud or on-premises).

For configuration and state management, use Azure Automation State Configuration (built on PowerShell Desired State Configuration).

Inventory can be managed with Log Analytics extensions for Windows or Linux. An Azure Monitoring Agent is available for on-premises or other clouds. Inventory is not instant though – can take 3-10 minutes for Log Analytics to ingest the data. Changes can be visualised (for state tracking purposes) in the Azure Portal.

Azure Monitor and Log Analytics can be used for data-driven insights, unified monitoring and workflow integration.

Responding to alerts can be achieved with Azure Automation Runbooks, which store scripts in Azure and run them in Azure. Scripts can use PowerShell or Python so support both Windows and Linux). A webhook can be triggered with and HTTP POST request. A Hybrid runbook worker can be used to run on-premises or in another cloud.

It’s possible to use the Azure VM agent to run a command on a VM from Azure portal without logging in!

Windows Server 2019

Windows Server strategy starts with Azure. Windows Server 2019 is focused on:

  • Hybrid:
    • Backup/connect/replicate VMs.
    • Storage Migration Service to migrate unstructured data into Azure IaaS or another on-premises location (from 2003+ to 2016/19).
      1. Inventory (interrogate storage, network security, SMB shares and data).
      2. Transfer (pairings of source and destination), including ACLs, users and groups. Details are logged in a CSV file.
      3. Cutover (make the new server look like the old one – same name and IP address). Validate before cutover – ensure everything will be OK. Read-only process (except change of name and IP at the end for the old server).
    • Azure File Sync: centralise file storage in Azure and transform existing file servers into hot caches of data.
    • Azure Network Adapter to connect servers directly to Azure networks (see above).
  • Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI):
    • The server market is still growing and is increasingly SSD-based.
    • Traditional rack looked like SAN, storage fabric, hypervisors, appliances (e.g. load balancer) and top of rack Ethernet switches.
    • Now we use standard x86 servers with local drives and software-defined everything. Manage with Admin Center in Windows Server (see below).
    • Windows Server now has support for persistent memory: DIMM-based; still there after a power-cycle.
    • The Windows Server Software Defined (WSSD) programme is the Microsoft approach to software-defined infrastructure.
  • Security: shielded VMs for Linux (VM as a black box, even for an administrator); integrated Windows Defender ATP; Exploit Guard; System Guard Runtime.
  • Application innovation: semi-annual updates are designed for containers. Windows Server 2019 is the latest LTSC channel so it has the 1709/1803 additions:
    • Enable developers and IT Pros to create cloud-native apps and modernise traditional apps using containers and micro services.
    • Linux containers on Windows host.
    • Service Fabric and Kubernetes for container orchestration.
    • Windows subsystem for Linux.
    • Optimised images for server core and nano server.

Windows Admin Center is core to the future of Windows Server management and, because it’s based on remote management, servers can be core or full installations – even containers (logs and console). Download from http://aka.ms/WACDownload

  • 50MB download, no need for a server. Runs in a browser and is included in Windows/Windows Server licence
  • Runs on a layer of PowerShell. Use the >_ icon to see the raw PowerShell used by Admin Center (copy and paste to use elsewhere).
  • Extensible platform.

What’s next?

  • More cloud integration
  • Update cadence is:
    • Insider builds every 2 weeks.
    • Semi-annual channel every 6 months (specifically for containers):
      • 1709/1803/1809/19xx.
    • Long-term servicing channel
      • Every 2-3 years.
      • 2016, 2019 (in September 2018), etc.

Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 reach the end of support in January 2020 but customers can move Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 servers to Azure and get 3 years of security updates for free (on-premises support is chargeable).

Further reading: What’s New in Windows Server 2019.

Containers/Azure Kubernetes Service

Containers:

  • Are fully-packaged applications that use a standard image format for better resource isolation and utilisation.
  • Are ready to deploy via an API call.
  • Are not Virtual machines (for Linux).
  • Do not use hardware virtualisation.
  • Offer no hard security boundary (for Linux).
  • Can be more cost effective/reliable.
  • Have no GUI.

Kubernetes is:

  • An open source system for auto-deployment, scaling and management of containerized apps.
  • Container Orchestrator to manage scheduling; affinity/anti-affinity; health monitoring; failover; scaling; networking; service discovery.
  • Modular and pluggable.
  • Self-healing.
  • Designed by Google based on a system they use to run billions of containers per week.
  • Described in “Phippy goes to the zoo”.

Azure container offers include:

  • Azure Container Instances (ACI): containers on demand (Linux or Windows) with no need to provision VMs or clusters; per-second billing; integration with other Azure services; a public IP; persistent storage.
  • Azure App Service for Linux: a fully-managed PaaS for containers including workflows and advanced features for web applications.
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): a managed Kubernetes offering.

Wrap-up

So, there you have it. An extremely long blog post with some highlights from my attendance at Microsoft Ignite | The Tour: London. It’s taken a while to write up so I hope the notes are useful to someone else!

Defining multiple RADIUS servers for Aruba Wi-Fi

This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
Wi-Fi logo (via Pixabay)

I’ve spent some time over the last few months working with a customer who is building a complete greenfield IT infrastructure, in preparation for launching a new business. It’s been a rare privilege to work without piles of technical debt (of course, it’s never completely that simple – there is data to bring across and there are some core systems that will tie back into the parent organisation) but there have been some challenges along the way too.

One of these was when the customer’s network partner asked for a RADIUS server to be added to our identity solution (to support 802.1x based authentication for Wi-Fi clients). In itself, that wasn’t too big an ask – we could use Windows Servers running Microsoft Network Policy Server (NPS), across two Azure regions. Unfortunately, we also needed to provide resilience and the network partner was suggesting that they could only configure one IP address in their HP-Aruba cloud controllers. Azure Load Balancers only work within region and DNS round robin is not exactly smart, so myself and the other Consultants working on the solution were left scratching our heads.

Luckily, for me, having a reasonably large Twitter network meant I could ask for help – and the help came (thanks to @Tim_Siddle and others)!

We were able to take the information about server groups to our networking partner, who advised us that the cloud controllers lacked the server groups capability until recently (it was only a feature on physical controllers) but that it had now been added.

Other people responded to say they had had similar issues in the past, so this might be useful for others who are trying to configure a certificate-based authentication solution for Wi-Fi with Microsoft NPS servers.

Further reading

Enabling RADIUS Server Authentication [Aruba]

Using a VPN to watch ITV content outside the UK

This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Those who follow me on Twitter (@markwilsonit) will probably be aware that I recently spent some time in mainland Europe – travelling through France, Germany and Switzerland with my family. You’ll probably also be aware that one of my hobbies is road cycling – and that I like to watch the highlights from the three Grand Tours (Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España) and from the Tour of Britain. With the Vuelta in full swing as my holiday started, I wanted to make sure I could still catch the highlights on ITV4!

Even with the new EU mobile roaming arrangements that mean I can use my mobile data allowance in other EU countries, I didn’t expect to be able to stream content reliably, so I took out a subscription to ITV Hub+, allowing me to download ITV programmes with the ITV Hub app (on Wi-Fi) and play back later, without ads. This worked brilliantly on the ferry to France but not so well once I was in my Paris hotel room, where the app detected I was outside the UK and denied access to content with a variety of error messages:

ITV Hub download error outside the UK ITV Hub download error outside the UK ITV Hub download error outside the UK

I was pretty annoyed – after all, there was no mention of UK-only coverage when I subscribed to the ITV Hub+ and the ITV website says:

“Where can I use a Hub+ subscription?

As long as you’re signed into your account, you’ll be able to use your Hub+ subscription almost anywhere. Watch ad-free telly on our website, download and catch up on the go on your mobile or tablet, or binge on your favourite shows with no interruptions on your Smart TV!”

but I did find the limitation in their troubleshooting guide later:

I am abroad and can’t watch videos
The ITV Hub is only available within the UK as we don’t hold international rights for all of our shows. If you’re lucky enough to be on holiday or you live abroad, you won’t be able to watch ITV Hub until you return to the UK”

After a bit of a rant on Twitter (no response from ITV, of course), I thought about using a VPN (and @JFDuncan suggested Plex).

Unfortunately, my own VPN back to my NAS didn’t work (on reflection, L2TP/IPSec was not the best choice of transport – as @GarryMartin pointed out when I originally set it up) and I was nervous about using a third party service until Justin Barker (@JustinBarker77) suggested TunnelBear:

Recommendations are always good. And TunnelBear seemed more legitimate than some of the sites I found…

At first, I didn’t have much luck – even after following TunnelBear’s troubleshooting advice for accessing content. 24 hours later though, something had cleared (maybe I had a different IP address, maybe it was something on my iPhone) and ITV Hub+ worked flawlessly over hotel Wi-Fi and a VPN back to the UK. I could download my cycling highlights for later playback and the VPN tunnel even seemed to improve the Holiday Inn Wi-Fi reliability – possibly due to QoS restrictions prioritising potential business traffic (VPN) over leisure (downloading videos)!

I did have some challenges with playback – so I put the iPhone into Airplane Mode before watching content, just in case the ITV Hub app detected I was outside the UK again, but each time I wanted to download over the next few days I enabled the VPN and all was good. I also subscribed to TunnelBear for a month’s worth of unlimited data allowance (I soon chewed through the 1GB I got for tweeting about the service!).

Hopefully, this information will help someone else who’s frustrated by paying for a download service and then finding it doesn’t work outside the UK…

Improving application performance from Azure with some network routing changes

This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a UK Government customer to move them from a legacy managed services contract with a systems integrator to a disaggregated solution built around SaaS services and a virtual datacentre in Azure.  I’d like to write a blog post on that but will have to be careful about confidentiality and it’s probably better that I wait until (hopefully) a risual case study is created.

One of the challenges we came across in recent weeks was application performance to a third-party-hosted solution that is accessed via a site-to-site VPN from the virtual datacentre in Azure.

My understanding is that outside access to Microsoft services hits a local point of presence (using geographically-localised DNS entries) and then is routed across the Microsoft global network to the appropriate datacentre.

The third-party application in Bedford (UK) and the virtual datacentre is in West Europe (Netherlands) so the data flows should have just been in Europe.  Even so, a traceroute from the third-party provider’s routers to our VPN endpoint suggested several long (~140ms) hops once traffic hit the Microsoft network. These long hops were adding significant latency and reducing application performance.

I logged a call under the customer’s Azure support contract and after several days of looking into the issue, then identifying a resolution, Microsoft came back and said words to the effect of “it should be fixed now – can you try again?”.  Sure enough, ping times (not the most accurate performance test it should be said) were significantly reduced and a traceroute showed that the last few hops on the route were now down to a few milliseconds (and some changes in the route). And overnight reports that had been taking significantly longer than previously came down to a fraction of the time – a massive improvement in application performance.

I asked Microsoft what had been done and they told me that the upstream provider was an Asian telco (Singtel) and that Microsoft didn’t have direct peering with them in Europe – only in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as in Asia.

The Microsoft global network defaults to sending peer routes learned in one location to the rest of the network.  Since the preference of the Singtel routes on the West Coast of the USA was higher than the preference of the Singtel routes learned in Europe, the Microsoft network preferred to carry the traffic to the West Coast of the US.  Because most of Singtel’s customers are based in Asia, it generally makes sense to carry traffic in that direction.

The resolution was to reconfigure the network to stop sending the Singtel routes learned in North America to Europe and to use one of Singtel’s local transit providers in Europe to reach them.

So, if you’re experiencing poor application performance when integrating with services in Azure, the route taken by the network traffic might just be something to consider. Getting changes made in the Microsoft network may not be so easy – but it’s worth a try if something genuinely is awry.