PIM role activations vs. PowerShell Tokens

The Case of the Missing Admin: Why Your PowerShell Token Might Not Be What You Think It Is

 Posted on September 6, 2025  |  Mike Martin

As administrators, we’ve all been there: a command fails with a “403 Forbidden” error, and the message says we don’t have the necessary role. You check the Microsoft Entra admin center, and there it is, staring back at you in plain sight: Global Administrator. So, why is the command still failing? This is the story of a deep-seated token issue and how a little bit of PowerShell forensics can save you from pulling your hair out. [Read More]
EntraID  PowerShell  PIM 

WSL2 Dns Issues

 Posted on March 19, 2025  |  Mike Martin

I decided to give Windows another chance recently for a work project (rolling out Windows 11 actually) and wanted to get some sort of development environment setup on my computer. Specifically, the ability to continue to run bash scripts where I’m most comfortable. Unfortunately, at one point I got an error while trying to run git clone ssh:... - the error was ping: google.com: Temporary failure in name resolution. After some googling, I saw some people talking about changing the /etc/wsl. [Read More]
WSL2  DNS  Cloudflare  VPN  Windows  Networking 

Windows App and MacOS Keychain

 Posted on December 18, 2024  |  Mike Martin

I recently updated from the “Microsoft Remote Desktop 10” application on Mac OS to the “Windows App” and was excited to see I did not have to migrate any servers I had stored. However, I did see some odd behaviors when attempting to access stored credentials. I had been dealing with the annoying error for some time and finally decided to do something about it. It ended up boiling down to being a Keychain Access (here is a link to Mac OS 14 as that is what I’m running at the time of writing this article) permission issue. [Read More]
RDP  Remote  Desktop  Windows  App  Keychain 

Authenticating to Microsoft Graph

How do you make requests to Microsoft Graph?

 Posted on October 2, 2024  |  Mike Martin

I have not touched Microsoft Graph in quite some time, and a recent project has forced me to re-familiarize myself with accessing it. It seems like things are always changing — whether it’s Microsoft changing Azure to Entra or npm packages being deprecated. I need to re-learn this stuff if I’m not keeping up with the ecosystems. I found myself looking for the best way to authenticate in order to use Microsoft Graph, and it seems that the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) is the way to go. [Read More]
Microsoft  Graph  MSAL  NodeJS 

Enable Remote Desktop on Azure Joined Machine

Remoting into a machine is not as simple as it used to be

 Posted on March 6, 2024  |  Mike Martin

I recently discovered that RDP’ing into a Windows machine is not as easy as it used to be. Last time I did this, I was primarily working on Windows 7 devices. Goodness how things have changed with Windows 10 AND joining them to Entra ID. Here is what I ended up getting to work. Assumptions The following steps assume you have already logged into this machine with a user and that user is now the device “owner”. [Read More]
Microsoft  Windows  RDP 

S3 Keys, Prefixes & Objects

Demystifying Amazon S3: Keys, Prefixes, and Zero-Byte Objects

 Posted on November 6, 2023  |  Mike Martin

I had a recent encounter with AWS S3 objects that initially really confused me, but after I worked through it, I have a much better understanding of what S3 is all about. Amazon S3 vs. Traditional File Systems Unlike traditional file systems with a clear hierarchical structure, S3 operates on a flatter architecture. Instead of organizing files within folders, S3 objects reside directly in your S3 bucket. The folder-like structure you observe in the console serves as a visual aid for quick comprehension, but it doesn’t represent the true nature of S3’s underlying organization. [Read More]
AWS  S3