Most of us are familiar with the tools available to create circuit diagrams, as generally that’s the first step towards producing a custom PCB. But that about the cables and wiring harnesses that don’t live on your board? How do you easily document the rat’s nest perfectly logical wiring of your latest and greatest creation?
That’s precisely the question that led [Daniel Rojas] to create WireViz. This open source Python tool takes human readable input files and turns them into attractive and functional visualizations of where all the wires in your project are going. It can even be used to generate a Bill of Materials that documents the lengths of wire required and types of connectors needed to hook everything up.
If you’re still using pre-made cables to connect all of your components together, than you might not immediately see the benefit of a tool like this. But as we’ve talked about in the past, the creation of custom wiring harnesses is something that serious hardware hackers should become familiar with. Yes it takes more effort, but the end result is worth it. With a tool like WireViz, the creation of a bespoke harness for your next project just got a little bit easier.
[Daniel] has done a fantastic job documenting this project, providing not only a tutorial on how to feed and care for your WireViz, but a gallery of examples that shows off the kind of complex wiring the tool can help make sense of. But there’s plenty more to be done, and he’s happy to get feedback or code contributions from anyone who wants to get involved.
Three-quarters claim pandemic didn’t trigger big changes to corporate security settings
Nearly three-quarters of IT professionals haven’t increased their company’s security posture during the COVID-19 pandemic – while 90 per cent highlighted remote working as a security risk, according to a survey.…
As corporations fall over themselves to perform their mostly abrupt commitments to racial justice, a few companies are seizing the moment to call out Facebook for its own failings.
A handful of the biggest names in outdoor gear have suspended ads across Facebook and Instagram for the month of July as part of #StopHateforProfit, an accountability campaign demanding a set of changes from Facebook around racism, misinformation and other harmful content on its platform.
Outdoor retail giants REI and The North Face announced their participation on Friday, with Patagonia joining over the weekend. The campaign issued a set of actionable demands for the company, calling for Facebook to stop collecting ad revenue from “misinformation and harmful content,” demanding more resources for users targeted by racism and other forms of hate and asking the company to provide moderators for private groups.
Patagonia is proud to join the Stop Hate for Profit campaign. We will pull all ads on Facebook and Instagram, effective immediately, through at least the end of July, pending meaningful action from the social media giant.
The campaign was coordinated by the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Free Press and Sleeping Giants, an organization behind many successful ad boycott pressure campaigns in recent years.
“We are asking all businesses to stand in solidarity with our most deeply held American values of freedom, equality and justice and not advertise on Facebook’s services in July,” the campaign’s website states.
“… Let’s send Facebook a powerful message: Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence.”
Facebook has come under frequent scrutiny in recent years for its failure to eradicate misinformation and hateful content. As TechCrunch previously reported, white supremacist content flourished on the platform, and Facebook and Instagram only moved to ban white nationalism and white separatism one year ago.
Facebook has also signaled its reluctance to take action against President Trump, who has frequently shared misinformation intended to discourage voters in recent weeks. In a surprising turn for a company that usually keeps internal dissent quiet, Facebook employees openly criticized their employer’s decision to take no action on a violent threat from the president against protesters in the days following George Floyd’s killing.
The threat, which warned “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” echoed racist threats by authorities made during the civil rights movement. Twitter’s decision to attach fact-checking labels or hide some of the president’s tweets at the time served to further highlight Facebook’s own reluctance to moderate its platform.
On the #StopHateforProfit website, the campaign explains the reasoning behind targeting Facebook for the boycott:
“They allowed incitement to violence against protesters fighting for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and so many others.
They named Breitbart News a “trusted news source” and made The Daily Caller a “fact checker” despite both publications having records of working with known white nationalists.
They turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression on their platform.
Could they protect and support Black users? Could they call out Holocaust denial as hate? Could they help get out the vote?
They absolutely could. But they are actively choosing not to do so.”
As media, tech and other businesses face long overdue reckonings around racism, the outdoor community is undergoing its own self-examination. Even as companies like REI and a growing handful of independent initiatives make efforts to highlight a diverse community beyond the straight white men who have long dominated the image of the outdoors, the adventure community must grapple with its reputation for toxicity and being hostile to change.
If change is difficult in the outdoor industry, forcing a tech platform with unprecedented resources and power to change is more akin to moving a mountain. Facebook faces regular criticism from the press and its users, but high profile efforts by brands forgoing ads on its platforms are something new. If they’ll build more momentum or last beyond the month isn’t clear, but we’ll be watching to see where the effort goes—and if Facebook considers making any of the reasonable changes its critics are demanding.
Many technology companies say they're committed to reducing their impact on the environment — but Logitech wants to show you exactly how. Today, it's announcing plans to put carbon impact ratings on its product boxes, starting with its gaming device…
Ubuntu has launched its Appliance Portfolio, an initiative designed to enable secure smart devices linked to cloud services. All Ubuntu appliances are “free to download and install” but may include an up-sell to paid-for services.…
Editor’s note: Over the coming weeks, we’ll share some of our most inspirational customers, partners, and solutions from the past 15 years. Today’s post features our nonprofits community and how they’ve embraced Google Maps Platform to achieve their organizations’ goals.
Over the past fifteen years, we’ve been humbled to see how the non-profit community has embraced Google Maps Platform to achieve their organizations’ goals—from building stronger communities and feeding the hungry to helping citizens find ways to engage with nature and the outdoors. Today we’re featuring fifteen non-profit organizations who inspire us every day to continue building and improving our location-based services and solutions.
California Academy of Sciences
The California Academy of Sciences is using maps to help people discover plant and animal life from around the world on iNaturalist.org. To help people share and learn about nature across the globe, they created multi-layered maps that are both educational for consumers and useful for researchers with Google Maps Platform.
World Walking World Walking provides a way for people to get outside to engage in fitness and reap the benefits of a healthier, active lifestyle. They provide a website where users can search and select walks all over the world, as well as mobile applications to access walks on the go.
Rails-to-Trails Conservancy
Rails-to-Trails Conservancy is dedicated to creating a nationwide network of trails from former rail lines and connecting corridors to build healthier places for healthier people. In 2006 Rails to Trails Conservancy published their interactive maps on their website, TrailLink.com leveraging Google Maps Platform. TrailLink is Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s trail-finder website and companion TrailLink mobile apps. Since that time they’ve mapped more than 36,000 miles of multi use trails.
Falling Fruit
Falling Fruit is a nonprofit that helps city dwellers harvest for food in their neighborhoods. Falling Fruit’s global map marks locations in 111 countries, and its website and mobile apps have been accessed by nearly 1 million people.
PulsePoint
To empower CPR-trained citizens to respond to local emergencies, the PulsePoint Foundation developed a mobile app based on Google Maps Platform to help communities reduce deaths from sudden cardiac arrest.
Infoxchange
Infoxchange created Ask Izzy, a free, mobile-first directory that helps homeless Australians find location-based services. The website gives homeless individuals information about over 350,000 vital nearby services such as shelter, food, needle exchanges, employment resources, and more
WhyHunger
WhyHunger helps communities develop sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. Their Find Food map displays food resources based on a zip code and the results include phone numbers, addresses, and the type of programs available.
KARUNA
KARUNA, a Berlin-based aid organization, created MOKLI—an online resource to provide access to critical resources to at-risk children and young people who live on the street. Young people who might be fearful of contacting parents, teachers or authorities are comfortable using Google Maps—a tool that’s familiar to them—to seek assistance
The American Red Cross
The American Red Cross provides an easy way for people to find locations to give blood within their Find a Blood Drive locator.
GoodSAM
GoodSAM connects trained first aid professionals to patients in cardiac arrest to support the provision of early CPR in the minutes before an ambulance arrival—saving lives around the world. Their community of Responders have mapped thousands of Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) creating the world’s largest defibrillator registry.
Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms
Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) uses Google Maps Platform to build communities that care about ecological farming. Their map-based website helps travelers find and work on organic farms.
Hosteling International
Hosteling International is a nonprofit which is a federation of over 4,000 hostels in more than 80 countries. Their map-based website helps travelers easily find places to stay that are designed for people like them, who are young, curious and want to be in a welcoming environment filled with international travelers
VolunteerMatch
VolunteerMatch connects people with good causes so they can make an impact in their local communities. They provide a “Live View,” on their site which shows all the activity on their network over the past hour. Icons on the map show the connections made between volunteers and organizations.
The California Native Plant Society
The California Native Plant Society created Calscape to help Californians restore nature and save water by showing people which plants are really native to any location in the state, helping them figure out which ones they want, and where to buy them and how to grow them.
Environmental Defense Fund
By making information about methane leaks transparent, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is providing a unique way for utilities, regulators and the public to work together and invest in infrastructure improvements and repairs.
We are impressed at the impact these organizations have been able to make within their local communities and world-wide over the past 15 years with Google Maps Platform. Learn more about the Google for Nonprofits program and how to apply for Google Maps Platform credits.
Honeywell's quantum computer is now commercially available after it was first announced in March. The company, best known in the US for making thermostats, says enterprise customers can access the machine either directly through one of its own interf…
I wrote a free app for sketching cloud architecture diagrams. All AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud icons and more are preloaded in the app. Hope the community finds it useful: cloudskew.com
Notes:
The app’s just a simple diagram editor, it doesn’t need access to any AWS, Azure, GCP accounts.
AI and machine learning seem like buzzwords at this point, with their mention spattered across press releases and new product launches. The ubiquity may have numbed us, but some cool and weird things are happening at least. Algoriddim leveraged AI fo…
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SiaFuse LLC is a company by community members CryptoHaag, Nickfost and DCreason
SiaShare is a virtual desktop that allows company employees to share a singular hub of files and folders from which they can collaborate. The UI can be tailored to the company-specific branding. A few companies have already been using the Beta, and the SiaFuse team is working on adding additional features (such as folder downloads and document preview).
SiaSentry is a simple layer 2 application that utilizes the Sia network in order to store and retrieve security footage. While simple in description, the features of this application will allow companies to store security footage for a much longer time and for much cheaper than current providers. They have a list of multiple clients, mostly in the oil refinery and bar/restaurant space, who have shown interest in using SiaSentry. In the current economic environment, companies are on the lookout to reduce costs to remain successful. Using the Sia backend, they are proud to offer both cost reduction and process efficiency.
E-paper displays are unusual in that power is only needed during a screen update. Once the display’s contents have been set, no power whatsoever is required to maintain the image. That’s pretty nifty. By making the display driver board communicate wirelessly over near-field communication (NFC) — which also provides a small amount of power — it is possible for this device to be both wireless and without any power source of its own. In a way, the technology required to do this has existed for some time, but the company Waveshare Electronics has recently made easy to use options available for sale. I ordered one of their 2.9 inch battery-less NFC displays to see how it acts.
What E-Paper Looks Like
An E-paper display is black and white, very high contrast, and doesn’t look quite like any other electronic display. It is about as readable as ink on paper, or somewhat more accurately, like LCD pixels but without any constraints on the viewing angle. With standard drive electronics, pixels are only capable of being either black or white, but image dithering to produce pictures with the appearance of greyscale works quite well.
This particular display’s screen is 2.9 inches diagonally, with a resolution of 296 x 128 pixels, but these battery-free displays come in a variety of sizes. The smallest is 2.13 inches, and the largest is a beefy 7.5 inches diagonal with a resolution of 800 x 480.
Updating via NFC
The display needs power only during a change of screen contents, and power for that comes from an NFC connection. There are evaluation kits of dedicated hardware for this purpose, but another option is a handy phone app. The app provides a simple way to send text or images to any of the Waveshare NFC displays.
Handily, images can be easily cropped and dithered in a variety of ways within the app before transmission, providing a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) preview. There is no need to push the change to the screen in order to see how it will look, and this really helps make sure results will look good before it ever hits the screen.
When connecting, there is a definite “sweet spot” for the NFC connection to work, but it’s not hard to get used to. On my Pixel 2, the display needs to be placed right up against the back of the phone and just under the camera while the app is open, and the process begins automatically. An update takes about three seconds, during which the screen briefly goes chaotic and snowy before it updates with the new content. In general, if the connection is broken prematurely, the screen remains unchanged.
I was able to successfully update the screen by holding the phone up to either the front or the back of the display. It didn’t seem to care much which way, but the display always needed to be placed right up against the phone.
What’s it Good For?
A battery-free display is pretty nifty, but what are the intended applications? The vendor lists price tags, labels, and name badges as some of the suggested uses, so I decided to do a simple evaluation of each of those to see how well the display performed.
Text is obviously readable, so I tested both a simple barcode and a QR code. After uploading them to the display, I tested whether they could be read and decoded. Unsurprisingly, both worked flawlessly.
Testing it as a name badge took a little more work. I designed and 3D printed a holder that allowed me to mount a safety pin on the back so I could pin it to clothing like a name badge.
A 3D-printed adapter turns the display into a serviceable name badge.
A handy feature of this display is that its enclosure has some little spring-loaded tabs on the back which can be used to clip the display into a carrier system (presumably one found on shelving units) and I took advantage of this to design a holder that was as small and light as possible while still being compatible with the spring-loaded tabs.
The display is not particularly large or heavy, but I still wasn’t sure whether it would make a workable name badge. Thanks in part to the lightweight carrier that adds only minimal thickness, the display worked fine when pinned on and was perfectly readable, even at a distance. The badge could still be updated from the front with the phone app, but while worn in this way I could no longer update it from the back. (Recall that it needs to be touching, or nearly touching, before the NFC update will work.)
Is Batteryless a Gimmick?
As mentioned, the technology to make these displays both wireless and battery-free has been around for years, but when we first mentioned Waveshare’s offerings it was a new thing to see ready-to-use versions for sale online. It’s worth pointing out that in terms of making the display usable, the phone app is very nearly as important as the display itself. Being able to easily and conveniently update the display with little effort and no additional hardware goes a long way towards making the unit useful.
Not having a battery is remarkable, but how useful is it really from a hacker project perspective? Power needs for a display like this are so low that it’s hard to imagine battery life being much of a concern. Swapping out a coin cell once every couple years doesn’t hurt much on a single device. For an entire warehouse, that would obviously make more sense.
But when it comes to hacker projects, no battery probably makes the device somewhat lighter and smaller, but does it enable anything particularly special? It’s sure neat, but is a display like this the missing link for any particular project or concept? If any light bulbs are going off in your head, be sure to share it with us in the comments.
As we’ve looked at the subject of face masks in the first two parts of this series, our emphasis has been on a physical step to aid your chances of making it through the COVID-19 pandemic in one piece. But given that the upheaval caused by all the social changes enacted to protect the population are likely to leave an indelible mark on those who live through them, there are significant aspects of surviving all this that go beyond the physical.
This will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for many people, a significant number will find it traumatic in some way, and for many of those people there will be an immediate and then ongoing effect on mental health. If anyone is in doubt as to from what position this is coming, I count myself among that number.
The Pressure Of A Once In A Lifetime Event
Piccadilly Circus, London, during the COVID-19 lockdown. Normally this is packed. Kwh1050 / CC BY-SA 4.0
Different countries have placed their own public health restrictions on their populations, but it’s likely that many of you are in some form of lockdown situation, with social or communal activities and locations closed or curtailed, going out restricted, and with all around you in the same situation. A perfect storm of having social outlets removed while simultaneously being stuck at home perhaps with family or housemates you’d prefer not to spend too much time with is not ideal. Add to that the multiple stresses from the pandemic itself as well as other news stories from our turbulent world, and it’s hardly a surprising that it’s taking a toll.
I’m almost at the point of forgetting which group uses which app, there are so many.
In my case, I found myself abruptly deprived of my main social outlets, as my hackerspace closed for the duration and my group of friends could no longer hang out. Living in the depths of the countryside as I do can be great in normal times, but being forbidden to leave my little part of it and seeing nobody else at all except my family members for a couple of months has given me a rough ride.
At first I dove into online meetings, and quickly amassed a pile of new apps for different services on my phone. But then the sheer number of social groups came to take up most of my evenings, I found I had little left to say, and gained a new source of stress lest I’d said the wrong thing, or not supported someone adequately, or looked like a fool. I’ve had an up-and-down existence these last couple of months, and the same worries can be found in whether I can find enough Hackaday stories to make up a month, or whether I taxed my car on time.
It’s OK, This Isn’t Normal
It’s crazy, finding oneself approaching burn-out when one should be having an easier time of it due to less of life’s normal stresses. But I suspect I’m not alone in this. I think my mistake was to expect that in extraordinary times I could continue on as normal, because while the world around us has gone a little crazy it’s all the same in my little office with its gently humming PC and oversized clacky keyboard.
Less of this…
If I have a takeaway from all this, it’s that what I needed to do was to recognise that this isn’t normal. It’s unreasonable to expect to be able to do things as before, even to be able to do more than before. I wasn’t having endless Jitsi and Zoom meetings before all this, in fact I didn’t even have either service. So why was I suddenly deeming myself able to be the life and soul of the party 24-7, and then chastising myself for being unable to live up to it?
And why was I surprised that feeding the ever-hungry maw of a continuous daily publication such as Hackaday was feeling so daunting? Few of us can be superhuman at the best of times, so perhaps we should all recognise that it’s OK to back off a little when things become too much. I found that backing away from the interactions helped me a load, and spreading out my Hackaday work also made it less intimidating.
…and more of this.
Recognising my limits and cutting back on the things that were bringing me down may have restored some balance, but I am still cut off from my peers and in uncomfortable proximity to my family. In this I am indebted to a small network of friends with whom I’ve been in regular phone contact. Not Jitsi or Zoom, good old-fashioned phone. We talk, we help, we keep each other sane. I hope I have been as much help to them in this as they have to me.
Finally, The Rest Of You Have A Part To Play Too
This has been my attempt to make sense of the pandemic as a mental health event, drawing on my own experiences. I’m not out of the wood yet, but I hope if you find yourself in a similar state then some of my coping strategies may be of help to you.
There is another side to this though, and it lies with those of you who aren’t suffering particularly from all this. Wow, I envy you! Some of you though maybe won’t realise that not everyone is like you, so now’s the time to consider this, and think before you speak and act around other people during this difficult time. If our community has an ugly side at times it can be that its culture can be unforgiving, and sometimes what may seem like a throwaway comment on a forum or social media to you could have a crushing effect on someone else. Part of us all getting through is making much more of an effort to be nice to one another, and thereby making ourselves a little better. Let’s do that.
Take care, and think about what you post, and if you see someone you know abruptly disappear, check up on them. Together, we will get through all this.
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50% Discount For All Cisco Exams. You will get a discount code simply by filling the below link and your code will be in your email to be used in any Cisco exam.
Amazon launched Echo Auto in the US back in 2018, designed to bring Alexa voice commands to vehicles where they wouldn’t normally be an option. Now, finally, it’s arrived in the UK and Canada, as well as Germany, Italy and Spain (it was previously al…
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Microsoft introduced UWP (Universal Windows Platform) apps in Windows OS based on UWA (Universal Windows Apps) to access across all compatible Microsoft Windows devices like […]
25 years after Westwood Studios’ first Command & Conquer game kicked off the hit real-time strategy series, gamers can roll back the clock with the Remastered Collection. Now available on both EA’s Origin store and Steam for $20, it includes both…
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If you want to get away from the usual rectangular cases for your Raspberry Pi, a new range of shaped cases has been introduced by RISCOSbits. There are two basic… Read more »
At this point, it’s pretty clear that USB-C has become the new standard connector for an increasing amount of applications, but predominantly charging. Even Apple is on board this time, and thanks to backwards compatibility, you don’t have to abandon devices using the older standards you may prefer for their simplicity or superior lint-resilience either. For [Mat] on the other hand, it’s USB-C all the way nowadays. Yet back in the day when he bought his laptop, he had the price tag convince him otherwise, and has come to regret it, as all the convenience of a slim design is cancelled out by dragging a bulky charger for the laptop’s proprietary charging port along.
Well, as the saying goes for situations like this: love it, leave it, or get out the tools and rework that sucker. Lucky enough, the original charger provides 20 V, which matches nicely the USB power delivery (PD) specification, and after opening up the laptop, [Mat] was happy to see that the interior provided enough room to fit the USB-C module he was planning to use. Even better, the charging port itself was a standalone component attached to a cable, so no modifications to the mainboard were necessary. Once the USB-C module was soldered to that same cable, the only thing left to do was carving a bigger hole on the laptop case, and saying good bye to the obsoleted charger.
The downside is of course the lack of actual USB functionality with that shiny new charging port, but that was never the goal here anyway. With more and more USB-C devices popping up, it’s also no surprise that we’ve seen modifications like this before, and not only with laptops. In case you’re thinking of upgrading one of your own devices to USB-C, and do wish for actual USB functionality, don’t worry, we got you covered as well.
Surely the most straightforward way of creating a smart power strip would be to take an existing model and hack in some relays that you could fire with a WiFi-enabled microcontroller. But where’s the fun in that? Instead of repurposing a commercial power strip for his recent project, [Md Raz] decided to just build the whole thing himself.
The project started with a 3D printed enclosure that could hold the electronics and three panel mount sockets. The use of heat-set inserts makes it a bit more robust for future upgrade work, but otherwise it’s a fairly simple rectangular design. Nobody ever said a power strip had to be pretty, right? In addition to the panel mount sockets, there’s also a AC-DC converter to step mains voltage down to 5 VDC for the ESP32.
In addition to the microcontroller, the custom PCB in the power strip holds a trio of MOSFETs connected to AQH223 solid state relay (SSR) chips. Once the ESP32 toggles the line attached to each MOSFET, the indicator LED above the outlet goes on and the appropriate SSR is thrown to turn on the power. With a simple web interface running on the microcontroller, all three outlets can be independently controlled from any device with a web browser.
A customer with a Windows Virtual Desktop deployment needed access to several file shares for one of their applications. The integration of Azure Storage Accounts with Active Directory allows us to provide this functionality without having to deploy and maintain file services on a virtual machine.
A sketch of the environment looks something like this:
Azure File Share integration with Active Directory
Based on the sketch above, you should think about the requirements to make this work:
Clients that access the file share need to be joined to a domain. This can be an Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS) managed domain or just plain old Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS). The steps to integrate the storage account with AADDS or AADS are different as we will see later. I will only look at AADS integration via a PowerShell script. In this case, the WVD virtual machines are joined to ADDS and domain controllers are available on Azure.
Users that access the file share need to have an account in ADDS that is synced to Azure AD (AAD). This is required because users or groups are given share-level permissions at the storage account level to their AAD identity. The NTFS-level permissions are given to the ADDS identity. Since this is a Windows Virtual Desktop deployment, that is already the case.
You should think about how the clients (WVD here) connect to the file share. If you only need access from Azure subnets, then VNET Service Endpoints are a good choice. This will configure direct routing to the storage account in the subnet’s route table and also provides the necessary security as public access to the storage account is blocked. You could also use Private Link or just access the storage account via public access. I do not recommend the latter so either use service endpoints or private link.
Configuring the integration
In the configuration of the storage account, you will see the following options:
Storage account AD integration options
Integration with AADDS is just a click on Enabled. For ADDS integration however, you need to follow another procedure from a virtual machine that is joined to the ADDS domain.
On that virtual machine, log on with an account that can create a computer object in ADDS in an OU that you set in the script. For best results, the account you use should be synced to AAD and should have at least the Contributor role on the storage account.
Next, download the Microsoft provided scripts from here and unzip them in a folder like C:\scripts. You should have the following scripts and modules in there:
Scripts and PowerShell module for Azure Storage Account integration
Next, add a script to the folder with the following contents and replace the <PLACEHOLDERS>:
Run the script from the C:\scripts folder so it can execute CopyToPSPath.ps1 and import the AzFilesHybrid module. The Join-AzStorageAccountForAuth cmdlet does the actual work. When you are asked to rerun the script, do so!
The result of the above script should be a computer account in the OU that you chose. The computer account has the name of the storage account.
In the storage account configuration, you should see the following:
The blurred section will show the domain name
Now we can proceed to granting “share-level” access rights, similar to share-level rights on a Windows file server.
Granting share-level access
Navigate to the file share and click IAM. You will see the following:
IAM on the file share level
Use + Add to add AAD users or groups. You can use the following roles:
Storage File Data SMB Share Reader: read access
Storage File Data SMB Share Contributor: read, write and delete
Storage File Data SMB Share Elevated Contributor: read, write and delete + modify ACLs at the NTFS level
For example, if I needed to grant read rights to the group APP_READERS in ADDS, I would grant the Storage File Data SMB Share Reader role to the APP_READERS group in Azure AD (synced from ADDS).
Like on a Windows File Server, share permissions are not sufficient. Let’s add some good old NTFS rights…
Granting NTFS Access Rights
For a smooth experience, log on to a domain-joined machine with an ADDS account that is synced to an AAD account that has at least the Contributor role on the storage account.
To grant the NTFS right, map a drive with the storage account key. Use the following command:
net use <desired-drive-letter>: \\<storage-account-name>.file.core.windows.net\<share-name> /user:Azure\<storage-account-name> <storage-account-key>
Get the storage account key from here:
Storage account access keys
Now you can open the mapped drive in Explorer and set NTFS rights. Alternatively, you can use icacls.exe or other tools.
Mapping the drive for users
Now that the storage account is integrated with ADDS, a user can log on to a domain-joined machine and mount the share without having to provide credentials. As long as the user has the necessary share and NTFS rights, she can access the data.
Mapping the drive can be done in many ways but a simple net use Z: \\storageaccountname.file.core.windows.net\share will suffice.
Securing the connection
You should configure the storage account in such a way that it only allows access from selected clients. In this case, because the clients are Windows Virtual Desktops in a specific Azure subnet, we can use Virtual Network Service Endpoints. They can be easily configured from Firewalls and Virtual Networks:
Access from selected networks only: 3 subnets in this case
Granting access to specific subnets results in the configuration of virtual network service endpoints and a modification of the subnet route table with a direct route to the storage account on the Microsoft network. Note that you are still connecting to the public IP of the storage account.
If you decide to use Private Link instead, you would get a private IP in your subnet that is mapped to the storage account. In that case, even on-premises clients could connect to the storage account over the VPN or ExpressRoute private peerings. Of course, using private link would require extra DNS configuration as well.
Conclusion
Although there is some work to be done upfront and there are requirements such as Azure AD and Azure AD Connect, using an Azure Storage Account to host Active Directory integrated file shares is recommended. Remember that it works with both AADDS and ADDS. In this post, we looked at ADDS only and integration via the Microsoft-provided PowerShell scripts.
With the pandemic still an ongoing problem, though seemingly tailing off for now, and the UK lockdown still mostly in place, another RISC OS user group has opted to explore… Read more »
So one of the cool features of Teams is network diagnostics. Trying to gather network information remotely from an end-user sucks. So one trick you can do with Teams is place a call to them for a while, disconnect the call, then look in the network diagnostics which will give you some decent information about the call. You get to see their network adapter, whether or not they used ethernet or wifi, their wifi signal strength, their wifi channel, their wifi band, their wifi RSSI, and their overall network statistics including jitter, packet loss, RTT, et cetera.
You can look at past calls as well if they happen to call from Teams/Skype a lot.
Teams Admin Center > Users > [User] > Call History then from there you can look at the statistics for any individual participant including in meetings. The icons in the overview section are filters and the Advanced tab gives you more information.
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