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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • This is specifically an issue with corporate M365 accounts when a user tries to migrate to a new phone without access to the old phone where the authenticator was setup.

    Personal MS accounts can backup their auth secret keys to cloud storage, and when signing in on a new device, it authenticates you with your cloud storage (Google/Apple) and properly restores your MS Authenticator app.

    The issue is that while MS says you can backup your corporate M365 accounts in MS Authenticator, it doesnt actually store the secret key, so it’s useless.

    Have your administrator enable TAP (Temporary Access Passwords) on the tenant. Then an M365 admin can create a TAP for your account that lets you login without a password/2FA. You can use the TAP to login and rejoin MS Authenticator app. The TAP expires in 1 hour by default.


  • ^ Your M365 admin needs to know where to manage the specific authentication methods and be sure to disable MS auth rollouts. By default right now, authentication rollouts are enabled on all tenants with P1 licensing or above, and it only supports the MS Authenticator app.

    Once that rollout is disabled, the authentication methods your admin has made available to you will actually work properly.


  • The Oracle Cloud VPS only has SSH key authentication enabled by default. You can also set it to only allow SSH from your home IP in the virtual firewall before the machine is ever spun up.

    Their current free ARM offering is 1 machine with 4-cores and 24gb RAM for life. You can also add another 2 AMD machines with 1-core and 1gb RAM and still be in their free-tier.

    If you’re going to set it up and take advantage of the ARM machine, make sure you pick a home location for your account that has multiple availability zones. San Fran right now only has 1 zone, so if the shared ARM instances are all used up, you’ll have to wait a few days and try again. Phoenix I think has 3, so you can try with another zone right away.


  • Edge/IE run some underlying services for built-in windows features, so uninstalling them can cause issues with completely different parts of the OS.

    Ran into an issue with a client still running Office 2016 where uninstalling IE11 prevented them from opening any links within those apps. Office was harcoded to look at IE for link handling and didn’t respect the setting for your default browser.


  • For Lenovo, install Win10 from a USB, install Lenovo Vantage, hit update. For Dell, install Win10 from a USB, install Dell Command Update, hit update.

    Manuallyneeding to find and install drivers stopped being a thing after Win10 1709, which was 6 years ago at this point. Win10 will almost always get you fully updated drivers if you just keep hitting Windows Update on a fresh install.


  • M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.

    If a BIOS update fails on them, they don’t have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.

    The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.

    I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.

    It’s at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can’t run the recovery from any other OS.

    Absolute baloney from Apple.