infrastructure

Do you want to know how to generate SAP SuccessFactors Offline Assertion on a mac? Doesn't matter, I'll tell you anyway, because I had to figure it out (again). 😂 This wasn't on my 2026 bingo card, but I better write it down for future reference.

So this week, I'm writing about something completely different. And not something nice. No, this week, I'm writing about licensing. I hate licensing.

This article explains another dumb issue I ran into. Suddenly - without a warning - a Blazor app running on an Azure App Service starts becoming unresponsive. And this happens without any changes by you. How do we start investigating this?

A working service can stop answering overnight when the IP beneath your AKS ingress changes — and when DNS records or firewall rules depend on that address, the fallout can be immediate and painful!

Ever thought Azure CLI was your reliable sidekick on Windows? Ha! You'd think so, until "Decryption failed: Key not valid for use in specified state" hits you out of nowhere.

Ah, the joys of Kubernetes wrangling – where even a "simple" cert swap feels like herding a bunch of ferrets on meth through a YAML labyrinth.

This article explains how to diagnose and fix a Dell XPS 15 laptop that won't start, indicated by blinking LED lights. It includes a list of blink codes and a step-by-step guide to resetting the BIOS.

This article explains a fix to a - frankly possibly a little bit dumb - problem, where all kubectl commands suddenly throw an error along the lines of "couldn't get current server API group list: Get \"http://localhost:8080/api?

This article explains how you can output the value of a secret variable stored in Azure DevOps. This applies both to secrets stored in a Variable Group, or Pipeline Variables stored as secrets. Is it safe, secure and advisable to do this? No!

Microsoft has just retired the Windows Dev Home experience before it ever came out of Preview -status. And before it ever became that useful. Or even functional, if you ask me.

Just a quick tip I learned the hard way: if you want to host a website on GitHub Pages, make sure to only point the www-subdomain, and not the "naked", apex domain, in case you're using it for email mailboxes.

This article is going live 24th of December in 2024. That's when we in Finland celebrate Christmas (yes - we celebrate on Christmas Eve, so that we can just chillax on Christmas day, either hungover, playing with our new toys, or both).

This article explains an issue that you probably shouldn't run into - unless you're doing something a bit dumb. Just like I was. Or still am.

This article aims to clear the confusion around the GitHub Repository Secrets and explain how to successfully use them in your pipelines for fun and profit! Well, mostly for additional security and pipeline parameterization, really...

Every now and then, you run into a situation where you have a certificate for a website or service, but for one reason or another, you don't have the whole chain.

Alright, so my months-long via dolorosa to achieve a functioning Windows workstation has now cost me a few weeks worth of hours of work and around $4000.

This article explains how to generate a CSR using the OpenSSL CLI toolkit. We'll go through a step-by-step guide to create a private key and a CSR.

This article explains how to get around a sudden issue, where Postman suddenly starts showing you a nondescript and slightly misleading error about a missing URL in your request when you haven't removed any parameters and the request just worked.

This article explains a couple of ways to fix an issue where after deployment, your Azure App Service suddenly starts throwing an error along the lines of "Error occurred during a cryptographic operation. at System.Web.Security.Cryptography.

This article explains how to list all "Environment Variables" (that's pipeline variables, job / stage variables, predefined variables and even local script variables that are mounted on to the agent as Environment Variables) using PowerShel...

This article explains how to fix an error "NoRegisteredProviderFound", which is thrown by az cli's aks commands when you're trying to run pretty much any aks commands in PowerShell/Terminal.

So, I'm an occasional developer (and a frequent scripter), so I occasionally need to, well, develop stuff. And quite often I need Docker for packaging whatever I'm trying to push out there, or possibly to run someone else's containers on my machine.

This article explains in very brief terms - it is Christmas and I'm enjoying my 2-week-long European vacation, after all 😉 - how to make sure your Azure DevOps (YAML) pipelines fire on schedule. Because by default, they won't.

This article explains how to get around new security limitations (did I say "limitations"? I meant "features") in Azure DevOps to make it tolerable to configure your Azure DevOps Deployment Environments.

In this article, I'll share a simple script for a simple use case: removing blobs from a virtual directory structure in a container in an Azure blob storage account.

Anyone still remember Log4Shell? The incredibly easy-to-exploit, zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, that made arbitrary code execution extremely simple and straightforward.

This article explains how to get around a weird quirk in Azure Static Web Apps local development story. Well - one of the quirks anyway. A real showstopper issue I ran into.

Azure offers this great offering that is in my mind underutilized still - managed certificates that they'll renew for you. While the offering is called Azure App Service Certificates , they are not only limited to being used in App Services.

Alright, so let's make this a quick one. I've had to google this multiple times, since I have to do this a couple of times per year, which is NOT often enough for me to remember it by heart, or even for my Terminal to remember the commands properly.

This article explains our solution to a very particular use case. We needed to go through .csproj files, find certain dependencies from them, and then figure out their versions. And all of this needed to happen in an Azure DevOps pipeline.

Another (possibly?) timely and weird one here! This article explains how to work around Azure DevOps suddenly stopping to play nice with Docker and the rest of our tooling and causing all builds to fail with oddly non-descript error messages.

Every now and then there comes a time when you need to fiddle with DNS. It's not that you want to do it, but sometimes you just can't avoid it.

Haha, another one of those "should've known it was this easy" in the books!

This article explains how to replace double quotes in string literal when replacing stuff in GitHub Actions using sed. Or rather, how to replace stuff with double quotes in it in GitHub Actions overall.

This article explains a quick fix to an error along the lines of "AndroidSignPackage" task was not given a value for the required parameter "KeyPass".

This article expands on my earlier article on automatically figuring out versioning in an Azure DevOps Pipeline. In the other article, you'd add Major and Minor versions as variables, and Patch (the last part of an x.y.

This article explains how to fix " AADSTS90097: An error has occurred during admin consent processing.

This article explains how to (possibly) fix an error along the lines of "Encountered error while fetching the list of EventHub PartitionIds" which is thrown by your Azure Function (or other code) trying to trigger based on IoT Hub or Event ...

Every now and then, you run into a situation where you might need an SSL (or TLS, as they nowadays usually actually are) certificate. You could always generate a self-signed one - but that won't be trusted by anyone, so that's no bueno.

A while back I got a request to change the default certificate for an AKS cluster. A customer didn't like the "Kubernetes Fake Certificate" that's shown when no other matching certificates can be found, and they wanted it changed.

This article explains another small but significant gotcha you "just need to know" when working with certificates and certification authorities, and you - just like me - are for some reason still using Windows as your workhorse.

It took me something like 10 years of struggling to get remote triggers to finally fire in Azure DevOps, and in this article, I'll share how I finally got the remote repository trigger to work for an actual Team Project in real production use (and th...

Heh, this article is going to be another one of those "Drat, I should've known this" articles. But maybe it'll be helpful for someone else as well! In this post I will explain how to get around the "Error: Invalid use of command line.

This post explains how to verify a private key (possibly a .key file) that you somehow got your hands on, that matches a certificate file (.cer) you also somehow are in possession of.

In Azure DevOps, you sometimes have a project that's being built with a certain .NET version. It'll require that particular SDK version, and most typically that is defined in the global.json file. However, if you also need to install a certain .

This article explains one possible reason why you might run into an error like " Variable reference is not valid. ':' was not followed by a valid variable name character.

Eh, this was a weird one. This article explains how to get around an issue where your build tools fail due to weird "path does not exist" errors when you're using bash to execute a restore to your project.

A while ago, I needed to move an Azure DevOps Git repository from one organization to another. And that was far easier than I thought. For once, a nice surprise from Git _and_ Azure DevOps 😀 So, let me tell you how that's done!

This article explains a solution to a rather annoying issue, where certificate validation for builds trying to fetch NuGet packages published by Microsoft fails when using .NET 5.

Okay, that's a title and a half. But let's see - what are we actually doing and why? In my particular case, I had to store a Dictionary<string, string> in a Postgres database. By default, that's not something Entity Framework handles.

My ASUS AC-68U requires an external server with a Fully-Qualified Domain Name for any logging to be persisted beyond a reboot of the router.

This is going to be another one of those really quick and short reminders to myself.

Have you ever wondered how you could roll back the latest layered Azure IoT Edge deployment? I have - it's actually pretty useful. But what for?

This article tries to bridge a gap in Microsoft's documentation for the Azure IoT Edge deployment model. Namely - all different ways to deploy modules or module configurations to your Azure IoT Edge devices, and which takes precedence over which.

So some time ago, I needed to configure my first Azure DevOps pipeline for an Azure IoT Edge project. I needed to figure out which tasks to use, how to handle variables - all that good stuff. And let's call it a learning experience.

Here is another pretty quick one - trying to debug Azure Functions fails with a confusing error message about failing to create a lease for a partition.

This quick blog post explains a couple of very simple fixes - essentially, user errors - to a simple problem that you might run into with Visual Studio when developing the latest of your cool Azure bits.

I was setting up a PostgreSQL database in Azure, to be used by a cutesy little Azure Function storing telemetry from a bunch of Azure IoT Edge Devices.

So another simple one. (I just seem to run into all of the issues whenever I try to do the simplest thing with Docker!) Or with anything, I guess - but yeah, that's another article then.

Okay - another one of the topics that I'm explaining probably more to myself than whoever's reading this later. But that's why I write this blog, so please bear with me. 🙂 Anyway, onto the actual issue at hand!

This article documents a simple but annoying fix to an issue with Azure DevOps. In this particular case, an incoming webhook (configured as a service connection) would fail to fire, no matter what.

Are you struggling with your Azure IoT Edge modules not receiving your Direct Method calls? Is EdgeHub reporting transient network issues? Are you seeing "Could not connect to your IoT hub: could not complete TLS handshake" errors?

This article explains a couple of steps you might need to take when executing a Single-Device deployment from Visual Studio Code to an Azure IoT Edge device.

In this article, I'm listing the quick fixes to your Azure Functions suddenly throwing seemingly random and very unexpected CORS errors.

It's the roaring twenties again, cloud is the hot stuff, and nobody needs a server anymore. Right? Nope! I've been involved in more on-prem or hybrid projects in the last 12 months than in the last 3-4 years combined.

This article describes the gotchas and weird one-offs that I've encountered with Azure IoT Edge so far.

Another one in the series of "random things that break when you try to run Docker on Windows"!

This article will explain how to run your arbitrary SQL commands against a Postgre SQL database running in a Docker container in Windows.

Recently, I needed to host a web-based thingamajiggy in WordPress and needed to include a couple of custom libraries. For the sake of quick iteration, I decided to use a public FTP folder that I already had on the same server in order to host this.

This was another (luckily pretty shallow) rabbit hole down some corporate IT and weird default configurations by our favorite tech-daddy Microsoft. In this article, I will describe one possible reason for a process called Vmmem.

One more article before Christmas! 😁 This time, I'll be fixing a function that's triggering based on new messages received through my IoT Hub in my Azure Functions project.

Another one in the series of "this should've been easy, but alas, you're the edge case". "You" being "me", and the "edge case" being our internal npm feed (registry), for whatever reason.

Another fun one with Azure Functions! At least it's a simple one: this time, I ran into a weird issue while doing some code reusing - well, copy-pasting - between a couple of different projects.

So, a while ago I posted about a fairly simple way to write your code for fetching secrets (and other confidential stuff) from Azure Key Vault in such a way, that it would work the same way both in Azure and on your local dev box.

This article explains another fun issue that you might run into when developing Azure Functions in your local environment. It was weird how unclear the few results were that I could find. And the issue is just... very hazy in general.

Another day, another issue - this time with an on-premises environment with a ridiculously complicated architecture and an absolute ton of pipelines.

Once again, I come to you with a surprisingly opaque problem and offer to share my bemusingly simple solution.

This article explains a quick solution to a pretty common Azure DevOps problem. Namely - random and annoying 404 (or sometimes 401) errors when trying to access your dear team projects.

This article aims to patch one annoying gap in Microsoft's documentation: how, exactly, do you update Azure Function App's application settings using an Azure DevOps build/release pipeline?

This article documents one of the simplest solutions to one of the simplest issues you might ever encounter with Azure DevOps.

Every now and then, you will run into a situation where you need to overwrite a database's contents with those of another database.

This article explains a quick and dirty fix when you get an error somewhat like this: "UsageConfigurationNotSupportedInSubscription" when you're deploying an Azure Logic App from a template.

This article describes a solution to an age-old question of mine: how can I add an Azure Active Directory object - like a security group - to multiple resource groups at once? I've had to do this multiple times, and manual work takes quite a while.

This article explains a quick and dirty fix when you get an error somewhat like " ApiNotFound " when you're deploying an Azure Logic App from a template.

This article explains one possible fix to "LinkedAuthorizationFailed" when you're deploying a Logic App from an Azure Automation template.

Let's go with a very simple "note-to-self" kind of a blog post today. Plenty of those to go around on this blog, and I am sure that there will be plenty more!

Rogue Azure Active Directories don't sound like a huge and widespread problem, but Microsoft's approach of generating unmanaged, viral AAD tenants whenever they encounter the tiniest reason to do so MUST be driven by some weird internal scorecard whe...

This short article simply documents how to install the dependencies for running Robot Framework on Azure DevOps' hosted agents.

Another day, another issue with Azure Functions ! For such a simple and powerful tool, it sure does produce a lot of topics for blog articles!

Sometimes, you need to change the hosting model (or tier) for your resources on Azure.

Azure DevOps pipelines have a pretty handy feature called Pipeline Caching . It'll help you avoid annoyingly long NuGet package restores in your builds.

Recently, I ran into a problem that I definitely caused myself. I had a certificate, that was created to authenticate an app against Azure AD. The encryption key for the .pfx file was, however, lost.

Well, that title is a mouthful. But it's the topic for today, so what can you do? That said, this article should be pretty topical, as the issue started popping up only a few days ago.

This article will describe a number of fixes to a situation, where your Visual Studio Cloud Explorer fails to show you the Azure Subscriptions you (should) have access to.

This article explains how to fix one of the many issues you might face when configuring Pulumi deployments for your Azure DevOps Pipelines! The particular error you may run into was "azureblob.

Ah, one more on the related topics of different configurations for your Azure Function apps. In this article, I will describe how you can configure the Entity Framework Core database context to be injected into your Azure Functions App.

Azure Functions use dependency injection, and that allows us to define all kinds of prebuilt or custom-built services as being available for our functions really easily.

This article explains how to fix your account, whenever it gets completely FUBAR due to your account being added as a guest in another AAD organization.

Another day, another variant of AADSTS50011! With a lot of apps and web services using Azure Active Directory for authentication, you're bound to run into issues, right? Ah well, one would hope to avoid them.

This article explains how to fix error with error code AADSTS50196. This issue usually comes up with an error message somewhat like "The server terminated an operation because it encountered a client request loop.

This article will go through different solutions for fixing issues with uploading pictures to your WordPress Media Library. There are plenty of reasons that could cause this issue - and a couple of different ways to run into it. But fear not!

Hah - another interesting one. This article describes how to resolve an error along the lines of " Microsoft.Data.SqlClient: Microsoft.Data.SqlClient is not supported on this platform. ", thrown by the Azure Functions host.

This article explains one easy way for you to improve the performance and uptime of your Azure App Service.

This article explains in extremely short way, how to fetch your Azure Active Directory tenant's Directory ID (also known as Tenant ID). Let's make it short and sweet, because quite frankly, it is really simple!

This article describes a solution to an error "Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program." I was debugging an Azure Function locally and ran into it - it stopped my Azure Function from starting at all.

This article describes a curious fix I found to an issue where Application Insights (seemingly) crashes your Azure App Service, leaving behind interesting, yet non-descriptive errors in the Application Event Logs.

This article will briefly explain the different NuGet package versioning schemes - both automatic and manual - available.

Every now and then you run into a situation, where you really need to run some SQL against your local development database. That database, at least in my case, is hosted on your local SQL Server Express.

So, another interesting issue I ran into when developing Azure Functions locally. What an endless bag of funsies!

I don't know about you, but it's happened to me a few times: fire up your Azure functions project, hit F5 to start debugging project builds without errors, Azure Functions host starts... And shuts down right away.

This blog post describes a very specific fix to a very specific issue.

Uh, okay, well. So this is where you should just RTFM (that's along the lines of "check the documentation" for those uninitiated in the world of unnecessary abbreviations).

We were working on getting our Robot Framework tests running during our builds on Azure DevOps.

I ran into another interesting one when working with a .NET Core 3.0 project and Entity Framework Core - this time, RuntimeIdentifier configuration causing trouble.

Okay - a quick piece of documentation that was a bit lackluster, so it's again a good idea to log somewhere. How to package a simple DLL that's a result of your Azure DevOps Pipeline?

This article describes the Azure regions, where Azure Monitor Application Insights is available.

Another day, another unsuccessful authentication attempt, and another cool error code. I encountered his one whilst building a little POC that was supposed to authenticate against Graph API. This time, I was thrown an "AADSTS700054" error..

This article describes how to fix the " AADSTS500113 : no-reply address is registered for the application " error. You typically get this error, when your app is trying to authenticate your users against Azure Active Directory.

This post describes how you can easily enable debug/verbose information for your Azure Functions for a lightweight and built-in way to extract just a bit more information out of your Azure Function executions.

This was a peculiar case!

Welp - another interesting error encountered while deploying Azure Functions to Azure.

Have you ever run into a situation, where you just wanted to remove the currently standing function definitions from your app service without actually nuking the whole Functions app? I have!

A couple of days ago, I got a comment asking how to fix error AADSTS90008 when developing an application using Azure Active Directory The error in question was this: AADSTS90008: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with...

Quite often you get the need to simply quickly query all the database sizes on MS SQL Server.

Whoops. This could happen to anyone since the Azure PowerShell (approximately) version 6.3.0 will cache your credentials between sessions without warning you.

Now for something totally different - for a change, I got to fix an issue with my own blog, so I had the chance to delve into PHP and WordPress configurations... :) PHP is an ever-evolving language - even if it might not always feel that way.

I recently ran into an issue when developing Azure Functions locally. My SPFx webpart was configured to request information from my locally running Azure Function but suddenly started ending up in error.

Ignite 2018 is done and dusted, and it's a good time to quickly recap what's new for Azure Functions in the coming months. They've certainly been getting a lot of love from Microsoft, which is GREAT!

Let me start this article, by reminding everyone that Azure Functions are awesome, and you should use them despite some hiccups. Having said that, let's fix some errors!

This article explains how you can access an Azure Function's Application/Environment settings/variables from your C# code.

So, you have a Client Id and a Client Secret, but don't know if they work anymore? Maybe they are expired? Maybe someone removed them? Maybe you copy-pasted them from the wrong Key Vault and they belong to another tenant? No worries!

Have you ever tried to find out the number of users of an enterprise application in your Office 365 tenant?

This article explains the most typical reasons why you might get an error with an "AADSTS70005" code, and how to fix it. Spoiler alert - it usually just requires enabling Azure AD implicit grant flow for authentication!

This post describes how to fix the error, where when publishing Azure Functions or Azure App Services you get an error like this: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.

So, you got an AADSTS50011 error code? It's just Azure AD's authentication acting up because of an invalid reply address! Here are a bunch of different reasons that could have led to this error.

This post describes one way to resolve a problem, where you receive an error like "The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable." when calling your Azure Functions.

So, you have an error with the code AADSTS50011 ? That's ok - it's just Azure AD 's authentication acting up because of invalid reply URLs ! Most of the time, it's a simple configuration issue.

So, you're running a console program, but while you try running it, you get an error like this: " StructureMap.Exceptions.

Have you run into the cryptical "AADSTS50059: No tenant-identifying information found in either the request or implied by any provided credentials." error? I have. This post will tell you how to fix it. How to fix AADSTS50059?

Is your Azure Web Application suffering from absolutely horrible load times every time someone accesses it for the first time every 15 minutes or so? Mine was. It was pitiful. I was developing a web-based service using EF6 and ASP.

Ah, everyone's favorite, classic topic! Debugging SharePoint On-Premises configuration issues is the best thing since sliced bread, right?

I stumbled upon a customer that complained about some pages in their intranet throwing weird errors with authentication.

---------------example-12------------------" rel="nofollow ugc">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-pnp/connect-pnponline?

With the usual configuration of Office 365 and Azure, there might be multiple Azure AD (AAD) instances associated with your subscription.

Ever had issues with different versions of Office programs not living in harmony together? Me too! This post describes how I was able to fix the issue and get Visio and Office 2016 of different installation types to play well together.

This is part 2 in my " One web developer's story about the downfall of web hosting " series - a frustrating firsthand experience with a formerly-great web hosting provider taken over by EIG (Endurance International Group).

This article is part 1 in my " One web developer's story about the downfall of web hosting " series; a frustrating firsthand experience with a formerly-great web hosting provider taken over by EIG (Endurance International Group).

This post describes my super-simple fix to a weird error about "Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL)" failing with federated sign-in when running PowerShell scripts against SharePoint Online.

This article explains how to work your way around the exception 'Cannot open server - requested by login...

This blog post describes how to set SharePoint's ULS level to "Extra Verbose" (VerboseEx) using PowerShell. This is not possible using the browser UI, so some POSH magic is required!

Have you ever run into this, very non-descriptive and weird SharePoint error message "Cannot uninstall the LanguagePack 0 because it is not deployed"?

This post describes how to resolve a kind of cryptic and oddly misdescriptive error message about Parser Error on your ASP.NET application or (an On-Premises) SharePoint site.

Sometimes - pretty often in the good old on-premises world, actually - you'll need to have a copy of all the packages that are deployed to a certain farm.

This post describes how to fix Windows Authentication on a SharePoint server that is failing on other local addresses other than localhost.