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Active Directory User Account Lockout Troubleshooting

Active Directory is such an important service that in most organisations after being implemented becomes essential and at the same time suddenly transparent to the end-user.

In my humble opinion even nowadays learning the fundamentals of Active Directory is very important for most support / technical roles and it will be a valuable skill for at least another decade, cloud technologies, for instance, will not make those skills disappear overnight.

Regardless of the size of the organisation who needs to support the end-user needs to understand well how it works or know how to solve the most common issues, in this article we will touch again of a very simple problem to investigate such the AD Account Lockout.

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How to Query and Log Off Remote Desktop Sessions with Powershell

The Remote Desktop Procotol (RDP) is still strong and it’s not going away anytime soon, indeed there are companies like CITRIX that have built part of their success creating robust management for it.
As you can Imagine, there a lot of ways to manage RDP according to the type of implementations or tools involved, so some corner cases will not be cover in this article. There are also tools like gateways that will provide a central management point for all sessions, but let’s assume that these tools are not available to you or not part your infrastructure design. Continue reading “How to Query and Log Off Remote Desktop Sessions with Powershell”

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Check if a mailbox exists with Python and smtplib

Every day we discover different tools that should make our life easier, enchanted by the promise of achieving the best result without any effort. If we can master that tool or technique we can solve many problems even without understanding or finding the root cause, right?

So often I’m guilty of making that assumption, because it not just lazyness it’s harder and it takes time and patience to break complicated puzzles into small simple pieces. Even more to put it all those parts back together to finally find answers to questions like: How? When? Why?

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