Author: Mikail

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Setting Office 365 User Passwords to Never Expire

The default policy for Office 365 user accounts is to automatically expire their passwords after 90 days.

Some of our users experienced this today and the most annoying thing about it was that they were not warned beforehand about it. They were simply locked out their account until they changed it there and then; unlike the Windows OS counterpart which gives you a comfortable 15 day warning before forcing you to change your password.

Anyway, this article will tell you how to set the password expiry from 90 days to never.
Office 365 already enforces a strong password policy BUT I do not recommend you change this setting if your users often use public terminals or are prone to writing their passwords on sticky notes and keeping them under their keyboards 🙂

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Setting Up a JMeter Instance on the Cloud to Inject Load Against Microsoft SQL Azure

So, you want to set-up load injection capabilities on the Amazon EC2 cloud to throw load against a Microsoft SQL Azure database?

This quick tutorial will show you how to do the following:

  • Setting up Apache JMeter (version 2.4 as of this post) on the Amazon EC2 Cloud
  • Setting up appropriate JDBC drivers
  • Setting the correct connection attributes to be able to successfully connect to the Microsoft SQL Azure database
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Setting JMeter Timestamp to Human Readable Format in Logs

The default timestamp format in JMeter csv logs is given in a Unix style format.
For some (including my colleagues and I), this simply introduces an unnecessary delay to the analysis process of performance tests. Granted it is pretty straightforward converting the format from Unix time to human time with the help of the Excel ‘HOUR’ function, but when you are analysing many tests, it becomes slightly repetitive and cumbersome when you have an option in JMeter to switch to a more human readable format 🙂

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Archiving a User’s Mailbox on Office 365

So an employee has left the company and you now need to archive the mailbox due to legal and/or company policies.
This article will give you a quick overview on how you can achieve this goal on an Office 365 mailbox while maintaining the integrity and security of your organisation’s 365 account.
Although not necessary, I recommend (as a pre-requisite) disabling account ‘sign-in’ capabilities and resetting the user account password.
This will prevent the user from logging in to the account and messing around with it whilst you are attempting to archive their mailbox.

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Disable Remote PowerShell for Office365 Users

For one reason or another, you may want to disable remote PowerShell access for all the users in your organisation.
The main reason for doing so would be to prevent ‘reconnaissance’ type attacks whereby a user will try to gain information about your network/organisation/topology/system etc by simply running (in this case) PowerShell queries against your organisation.

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