New World Briar
When trying to complete the Windsward Hamlet Barkeep’s No Confidence Stew quest, we need to find Briar Branches.
You can find Briar Branches near rivers and lakes. They are brown thorny bushes with green leaves, and will display “Briar” when looking at them. I found them near a lake just South West of Windsward Hamlet.
So there is a quest named “Alchemists Needed” in WindsWard Hamlet. The mission is to Acquire Common Health Potion. In order to complete this mission, one of the ingredients for the potion is named Sporebloom Fruit. Searching resource maps online didn’t help so I basically ran around along all the rivers in the area and collected all types of plants. I was then able to craft the Common Health Potion. At this point I found that we can click on the Recipe ingredient titled:
Tier 2 Medicinal Reagents (PRIMARY)
Under this recipe item I finally found all of the ingredients that make up Sporebloom Fruit. 1. Click on the Common Health Potion 2. Click on the Tier 2 Medicinal Reagents (PRIMARY) 0/1 Sporebloom Fruit menu:
3. Now uncheck / clear the box that says Owned Items:
4. Hover your mouse over each ingredient. Now we can see what the (Primary) ingredient constitutes, and they are:
If you have employees who change phone extensions, names, departments, address, or titles a lot, HR or management may want to have this contact information data updated in Office365. Oftentimes these little changes can add up and we want to make a lot of changes in bulk with a single command. Instead of updating manually, we can make the changes to an Excel csv file and upload the changes all at once.
Ok in order to import/update the contact information for employees in the Office 365 tenant using a csv file and PowerShell, do the following:
Edit the attached CSV file with information that needs to be imported into O365. **Note: the UserPrincipleName and DisplayName columns are required.** FYI, screenshot below is how I exported the required data from O365 and copied the required columns into the attached file.
Next, start a (hybrid) PowerShell session into your O365 tenant.
Run the following command, replacing the path in the script to the location of the .csv file on your computer.
Import-Csv "C:\Users\jcoltrin\Desktop\o365Users\contact_details_powershell_upload.csv" | foreach {Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName $_.UserPrincipalName -FirstName $_.FirstName -LastName $_.LastName -DisplayName $_.DisplayName -Title $_.Title -Department $_.Department -Office $_.Office -PhoneNumber $_.PhoneNumber -fax $_.fax -MobilePhone $_.MobilePhone -StreetAddress $_.StreetAddress -city $_.City -State $_.State -PostalCode $_.PostalCode -Country $_.Country
That’s it!
If your users report that the “Start Recording” button in Microsoft Teams is disabled and/or “greyed” out and/or “grayed out,” then perhaps recently the storage path for Teams to One Drive had changed, or there was a policy change or a tenant change occurred which caused the problem. Regardless, the following resolved the issue and fixed the grayed out problem for us. Special thanks to Ryu_Yosei for providing a solution here; below is the step-by-step.
For starters, this resolution’s time-to-fix is about 20 minutes. You’ll first want to start by opening a Microsoft Exchange Online Powershell Module as an Administrator, into the Tenant that is having the issue. If you’re unfamiliar with how to do this, follow the instructions in the first part of the procedure/guide here. One caveat, is that in order to import the required MicrosoftTeams module, we want to ensure that we start the Exchange Powershell session as an Administrator.
After installing the Hybrid Exchange Shell, we will probably have a desktop shortcut. Right-clicking on the shortcut doesn’t give us the usual “Run as an Administrator” option. Instead, we’ll want to first start a command ‘cmd’ prompt, run that as an administrator first, and then launch the Exchange Shell from within the command prompt.
4. Next, inside the Administrator command prompt, issue the commands
cd c:\Users\Username\Desktop
5. Next start the Exchange module by running the command:
"Microsoft Exchange Online Powershell Module.appref-ms"
Now the Exchange Powershell session should open as an administrator and we can continue.
Connect-EXOPSSession -UserPrincipalName [email protected]
You may be prompted to log into O365, and perform multi-factor authentication if necessary. Next, if we do not already have the Teams module installed, issue the commands:
Get-Module MicrosoftTeams Install-Module MicrosoftTeams
We’ll see some information asking to allow to trust the repo, so type y for yes.
PS C:\Users\jcoltrin> Install-Module MicrosoftTeams Untrusted repository You are installing the modules from an untrusted repository. If you trust this repository, change its InstallationPolicy value by running the Set-PSRepository cmdlet. Are you sure you want to install the modules from 'PSGallery'? [Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help (default is "N"): y
Next we’ll want to connect to Microsoft Teams in our tenant with the command:
Connect-MicrosoftTeams
We’ll have the system return some information including our Account, Environment, Tenant, and TenantId. We can now check the status of our CsTeamsCallingPolicy with the command:
Get-CsTeamsCallingPolicy -Identity Global
In our case if we look at the entry for AllowCloudRecordingForCalls, we can see it is set to False:
To change this to True, use the following command:
Set-CsTeamsCallingPolicy -Identity Global -AllowCloudRecordingForCalls $true
We can check to see if the command worked by issuing the previous command again:
Get-CsTeamsCallingPolicy -Identity Global
We can now see that AllowCloudRecordingForCalls is now set to True:
The setting should take place pretty much immediately across the tenant, however, users will still see the Start Recording button is disabled or grayed out until they completely Quit Teams and then restart the App again. To quit teams, in the bottom-right corner of the Windows primary desktop, down by the clock, expand the SysTray, right-click on the Teams icon and choose Quit.
Restart and/or Sign into Microsoft Teams again, start a test Call/Meeting with an associate, and check to see that Start Recording is now available and enabled.
Hopefully this guide helps restore your ability to record Teams calls. If something else worked for you, please leave a note in the comments below.
If your organization has been utilizing SharePoint’s “View in File Explorer” or “Open With Explorer” to map a drive to a SharePoint directory, you may have had problems opening SharePoint files in File Explorer, the connection between SharePoint and the File Explorer breaks, the Mapped Drive disconnects, or the connection is unreliable. Also, SharePoint can be a bit cumbersome when trying to work with files in the web-browser. The outdated SharePoint “View in File Explorer” feature was built with WebDav in the 90’s, and may use ActiveX controls, which is why it relies on Internet Explorer version 10 and/or 11 to run. You may recall we wrote about troubleshooting SharePoint’s “Open in File Explorer” here.
Microsoft’s preferred alternative to “View in File Explorer” is OneDrive Sync, and Files On Demand (FOD.) When we think of “Sync”, we probably think of the classic Windows “Offline Files” configured in the Control Panel’s Sync Center. However, OneDrive Sync is not the same as Offline Files.
OneDrive Sync utilizes the more modern technology, Files-on-Demand (FOD), which is configured in OneDrive Settings. Once configured, Files on Demand will only pull the index of all the files and folders in a SharePoint Library.
If desired, we can get the entire file/folder/data by right-clicking on the file or folder and choosing “Always keep on this device.” By default, if FOD is enabled, and we choose to Sync, we’ll only get an index of the SharePoint Library in the File Explorer (and we won’t sync the entire library and data contained there in.)
Before we Sync our SharePoint Library, make sure the OneDrive app is up to date and is running and logged in with the same credentials used to log into SharePoint online at www.office.com. Look for the blue or white cloud icon in the Systray (bottom right corner of your primary screen; near the clock,) then right-click, and click Settings.
Next, in the Settings dialog box, near the bottom, place a check mark in the Files On-Demand / “Save space and download files as you use them” checkbox.
Next, open the Edge web browser and sign into www.office.com. Click on the SharePoint icon and then navigate to a Document Library that you would like to sync. Next, click the Sync button at the top of the Library:
Normally we’ll see a couple pop-ups: Getting Ready to Sync, and You are Now Syncing:
We’ll now have the SharePoint Library’s index built in our File Explorer with the files now having a status of either “Cloud Icon” or “Green Check Mark” next to each folder/file. As the Sync runs, we can check the Sync status by right-clicking on the OneDrive icon in the Systray.
If you attempt to sync a library that already has a shortcut pointing to that library from within the user’s OneDrive folder, you may get an error:
Sorry, we can’t sync this folder – You’ve already syncing a shortcut to a folder from this shared library.
So what the error means is just that. Look in the user’s OneDrive folder in the file explorer and look for a folder/file that has a link icon (screenshot below). Special thanks to Hans Bender blog for pointing this out: https://hansbrender.com/2020/10/07/onedrive-for-business-add-to-onedrive-problems/
The icon will appear to have a link, so right-click on the folder that’s pointing to the Library you’re trying to Sync, and choose remove shortcut. Now we should be able to Sync the library.
If we want to have the file in SharePoint downloaded completely to our computer, right-click and choose “Always keep on this device.”
We probably do not want “Always keep on Device” for the entire Folder/Library, as it will eat up our entire hard drive.
If a file or folder is inadvertently kept on our device, we can right-click and instead choose “Free up space” on the file (greyed-out in the screenshot above.)
Take note in the screenshot above, the newly-synced Shared Library is not directly under OneDrive in the left navigation pane of the File Explorer, instead, it is listed separately below it and has a different “building” type icon.
So now we can use Word and Excel apps to browse our local computer for files that are synced with SharePoint without having to use the old “Open/View in File Explorer” method.
For example, if we want to open a SharePoint file inside Excel, we click the File menu > Open > Browse > Organization / Library > File.xlsx > Open
Once we have made our changes and click Save, we’ll see a green checkmark under the Status column inside the File Explorer.
We hope that if you’ve experienced difficulty opening SharePoint files in the Windows 10 File explorer, this procedure and OneDrive Sync will provide a more stable and fluid means of browsing SharePoint files in the File Explorer.
When you manage a large amount of Exchange mailboxes, inevitably someone will leave the organization, and you have to setup autoreplies with a message stating the user is no longer available by email. Common sense dictates we will setup a noreply@ mailbox and add the terminated users as alias’ to that mailbox, but not so fast. After a few days of testing and working with support, we’ve found that setting up a shared mailbox with autoreplies enabled with the terminated user’s unique email address/alias, provides the most consistent results.
We’re not going to go through the myriad of possible scenarios about what your org does with a mailbox after a user leaves. Instead, we’ll assume the mailbox is now deleted, and forwarding of mail bound for that mailbox is no longer necessary. To be on the safe side, ensure you back up the mailbox in some way before deleting the mail.
When testing auto replies, you may want to use the Exchange Message Tracker to see the messages come in and go out. To get there, go to O365 Admin > Exchange > Mail Flow > Message Trace.
A good thing to note here is that while performing a message trace, when sending test messages to the newly created shared mailbox with Automatic Replies enabled from within the same tenant or domain, auto reply messages may Drop with the following error:
| Date/Time | Drop | Reason: [{LED=250 2.1.5 RESOLVER.OOF.ExtToInt; handled external OOF addressed to internal recipient};{MSG=};{FQDN=};{IP=};{LRT=}] |
This Drop message is actually an intended action, and is not an error, as it is probably used to prevent a loop of autoreplies within the same tenant.
Getting back to our original issue, to generate autoreplies, we first tried to setup a “noreply@” shared mailbox and add terminated user’s email addresses as aliases to the noreply box, but we got inconsistent results. Instead, we did the following.
Next place Checkmarks in both “Send automatic replies to senders inside this organization” and “Send automatic replies to senders outside this organization”
Add a reply blurb which can be something similar to the following:
The Representative you are trying to contact is no longer affiliated with this Corporation. You will be receiving communication with more information pertaining to the transition of the Representative on your account. If you have an urgent matter and would like to speak with someone, please call our Service Center at 800-555-5555 between the hours of 6am-5pm (PST).
Click “Save” at the bottom and you should be all set.
If you want to test, you can try sending an email from an account outside your organization. *Note – when we sent a test message from gmail, the autoreply ended up going into the gmail account’s spam folder.
If further errors are encountered, you may need to look at your spam/external forwarding policies in your mail filtering site at https://protection.office.com/antispam or reach out to MS Support.
So recently Windows 10 has enabled a security feature that redirects certain websites like www.office.com to the Edge browser. If you need to get into a website using Internet Explorer, for now the workaround is to disable the Edge redirect setting inside the Edge browser settings.
If you use SharePoint online a lot you have probably found that Open in File Explorer is a convenient way to manage your SharePoint files and libraries in Windows 10. You’ve also probably found that in order to view the SharePoint files in the Windows 10 File Explorer, you first need to open Internet Explorer, then open the SharePoint library, find the link Return to Classic SharePoint in the bottom left corner of the SharePoint library page, and then click on the Open in File Explorer link inside Classic Mode. Details on how to troubleshoot opening SharePoint files in File Explorer can be found here. If you want an alternative way to browse SharePoint files in Windows 10 File Explorer using Edge, please go here.
If you want to know how to disable or remove the IE to Edge redirect, use the following instructions:
Start by opening the Edge browser.
In Edge, click on the … ellipsis menu in the upper-right corner, and then click Settings. Or in the address bar at the top of Edge, type edge://settings/defaultbrowser and press Enter.
Next, inside the Edge Settings page, on the left side menu, click Default browser.
Change the setting “Let Internet Explorer open sites in Microsoft Edge” to Never.
That should do it!
Close the Settings Tab/Edge browser. Close and then open Internet Explorer browser. Go to www.office.com in IE and it should let you in.
So if you suspect you may have a bad Cat5/6 Ethernet patch cable, you can use a cisco switch cli interface and a few commands to diagnose if the copper pairs of cables connected to the switch are bad. The commands and explanation of TDR (Time-Domain Reflectometer) I found here.
First, ssh or telnet or use the web interface to connect to the switch with the suspect cable.
Use the following command to show the list of interfaces on your switch:
show interfaces
You’ll want to make note of how the interface is described in the previous command because Cisco is pretty particular. In my case I’ll test GigabitEthernet1/0/1.
Next issue the following command to first test the interface in question:
test cable tdr interface GigabitEthernet1/0/1
You will probably get something like the following result:
TDR test started on interface Gi1/0/1 A TDR test can take a few seconds to run on an interface Use 'show cable-diagnostics tdr' to read the TDR results.
Wait 10 seconds and then issue the command to show the cable diagnostics result:
show cable-diagnostics tdr interface GigabitEthernet1/0/1
And the output will look something like the following:
TDR test last run on: December 05 18:50:53
Interface Speed Local pair Pair length Remote pair Pair status
Gi1/0/1 1000M Pair A 19 +/- 10 meters Pair B Normal
Pair B 19 +/- 10 meters Pair A Normal
Pair C 19 +/- 10 meters Pair D Normal
Pair D 19 +/- 10 meters Pair C Normal
In our results we see Normal under Status. The following could be your status if there is a problem.
| Result | Explanation |
| Normal | Ideal result you want. If testing FastEthernet, you want Pair A and B as “Normal”. If testing GigabitEthernet, you want ALL as “Normal”. |
| Open | Open circuit. This means that one (or more) pair has “no pin contact”. |
| Short | Short circuit. |
| Impedance Mismatched | Bad cable. For more explanation, go here. |
Here are the cable pairs explained:
| Pairs | Function |
| A | This pair controls whether or not the port should go up or down. |
| B | Protocol-level and controls FastEthernet. |
| C | Power over Ethernet (PoE) |
| D | GigabitEthernet |
So as you can see TDR can be a handy tool especially if your cable tester battery is out.
If you have a disk drive that is running out of space because a database is starting to grow too large for the drive in an EBS volume on AWS, you may be asked to modify or expand the volume. In this case, we are tasked with expanding the “E drive” on a Windows Server 2012 AWS virtual machine. Because this is not a boot volume, and because it is an NVMe-based gp2 volume, it will be fairly easy to expand the volume without having to do things like shut down the instance, take a snapshot, expand the snapshot etc.
When you have a lot of disks attached to a Windows Server corresponding to a lot of different volumes attached to the instance in AWS, it can be a little tricky identifying the correct volume to expand. Read below to learn how to match an EBS volume in AWS to a Disk drive in Windows, expand the volume in AWS, and then finally resize the disk in Windows.
First, log into AWS
Next, Go to EC2 > Find your instance in EC2 by name, select it, then copy the instance ID.
Next, navigate in AWS to EBS > Volumes.
Find all the volume names associated with the instance by pasting the Instance ID into the search box at the top of the screen.
Now we’ll switch over to Windows. RDP into the server we want to modify. Once we’re in the server’s desktop, we want to download ebsnvme-id.zip from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/nvme-ebs-volumes.html And unzip/copy the .exe to your desktop.
Next find the command prompt and open CMD as administrator (right-click on CMD icon > run as administrator.)
Change directory in CMD to your desktop with the command:
cd c:\users\jcoltrin\desktop
Run the ebsnvme-id.exe in the Administrator Command Prompt
Next, on the Windows server, open Server Manager
In the upper-right corner of Server Manager, go to Tools > Computer Management
Make note of which disk (Disk 0, Disk 1, Disk 2, etc) corresponds to the Device Name and Volume ID that you want to change. In my case I want to expand Disk E, which is also known as Disk 3. Looking at the output of the CMD screenshot above, I can see Disk 3 shows my Volume ID is vol-0a17e…, and Device Name is XVDB.
Now that we are sure which volume it is we want to expand, and that this is not our Boot drive we can right-click on the vol-0a17e… volume in EBS and choose Modify Volume. **If the Disk is your boot drive, a snapshot should be taken first, and then shut down to expand the snapshot volume, then detach the snapshot, and attach the expanded volume.
A new dialog box pops up asking for the new size of the volume:
Enter the new size and click Modify.
Switch gears and now go back to your RDP session, go to Disk Managment, Right click on the volume and choose Extend Volume… > use all of the available space and click ok.
Our Volume size has now been increased and we can continue to grow!
To enable Bitlocker on your Windows computer, you first need to be running the Windows 10 Pro operating system. Windows 7, Windows 8, and ‘Windows 10 Home’ versions do not support Bitlocker.
It’s a good idea to first know your current operating system version. To do so, click on the Start Button and type “WinVer” and then press Enter:
Check the version of operating system. You need to have Windows 10 Pro. As of the time of writing this article, the most version of Windows 10 is Version 1909 (OS Build 18363.592).
If you have Windows 7, follow the upgrade instructions below. If you have Windows 10 Home, then you need to purchase the upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, and follow instructions here.
You need to upgrade from Windows 7 Home to Windows 10 Home before you can upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.
If you are on Windows 7 or Windows 8, do a web search for the Windows Media Creation Tool, or you can find it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
When running the Media Creation Tool, run the Upgrade option. It will take a while and several reboots to upgrade from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10. If you started with Windows 7 Home or Windows 8 Home, the tool will most likely upgrade your PC to Windows 10 Home.
After you’ve finished the ‘Windows 7 Home’ to ‘Windows 10 Home’ upgrade, you now need to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro in order to get the Bitlocker feature.
To upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro, click on the start button and type ‘Microsoft Store‘ and press Enter.
In the store, search for Windows 10 Pro in the upper-right corner of the store:
Purchase the upgrade ($99) and then run the upgrade. The process will take a while and several reboots.
Once you are on Windows 10 Pro, open the File Explorer, click This PC, then Righ- click on the C: drive and choose Turn on Bitlocker or Manage Bitlocker.
Follow the prompts and enable bitlocker.
After the reboot, log in to the desktop again, and use the Windows Control Panel to check the status. Please follow instructions here:
