Todd's Blog

The Gruffalo’s Child

posted on March 12, 2015

I had the chance this past weekend to take Nathan to the Gruffalo’s child. It was at The Grand Theatre and put on by Tall Stories. The city also had a table setup to make crafts. In typical Nathan style, he made 2 puppets. The kid loves doing arts and crafts.

We waited for the show to start and one of the things that impressed me most was about five minutes before the show started the mouse, who is one of the main character’s in the show, comes out and starts working the crowd asking for cheese. The reason this impressed me is as one who has done a fair number of IT presentations over the years, meeting the crowd beforehand gives a good feel to gauge your audience.

The show started shortly after and I will say it was very well done. The person playing the Gruffalo also plays the part of the Snake, Owl and Fox and he did a great job mixing it up. All the actors were very good and I caught the lady playing the mouse smiling from ear to ear as she rested along side the stage waiting for her next part in the play. You could tell she was enjoying performing the show. There was a joke or two that maybe only the adults would have picked up but this show did a great job of entertaining all ages. I see they are moving on to the United States now but if you do get the chance go see a show, do it as I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Pictures of the Gruffalo’s Child play are courtesy of Tall Stories.

Hybrid Cloud for IT Pros – A Series on Azure

posted on March 11, 2015

Microsoft Tech Evanglists in the US are posting a series on Azure called Hybrid Cloud for IT Professionals. The link to it is http://blogs.technet.com/b/it_pro/archive/2015/03/07/the-hybrid-cloud-and-the-it-professional-the-blog-series.aspx?linkId=12794611.

Azure is capable of many things. I use it to host websites and also use it to host some of my own domain controllers and some of my ADFS infrastructure. Learning to schedule how to turn off resources when not needed is a skill that will help you save money using Azure as well.

I find Azure is a great tool, helping me deploy things quickly but I find not all customers are able to take advantage of it. Some have regulatory hurdles (data sovereignty) and some just don’t have the man power or knowledge to do that. If you find you are the latter, get in contact with me and I can help with that.

Securing SQL Traffic using Certificates

posted on February 11, 2015

I am deploying Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) for a customer and one of the things we want to do is encrypt the traffic between the front end application server and the SQL Server. Here is what the topology looks like from TechNet.

Securing the connection between the two servers is relatively straight forward. First get a certificate from your favourite Certificate authority (can be internal or can be 3rd party in this case, your choice) and import it into your personal certificate store. What kind of cert do you need, check TechNet for the answer to that question. Basically it needs to be able to handle server authentication. Once imported, right-click on the certificate and manage the keys.

Here you assign read access to the keys to the account that runs the database service which will use the certificate. In my case I used a service account of srvdbsi01 so I assign that account the rights of read.

Open SQL Configuration Manager. Expand SQL Server Network Configuration and right-click on Protocols for MSSQLSERVER or whatever the name of the instance you want to secure is.