First 40 PCs, then 100, and then 140 machines crashing, spreading fast. Then I stepped in… The First 40 Around 10 AM, the Help Desk escalated to my Teams channel: “40+ computers completely locked down—users can’t launch anything, not even Settings or Task Manager.” My colleagues had been troubleshooting for 3.5 hours. When I heard…
Author: Steve Burns
CrowdStrike Outage – Full Story
It seemed like the worlds largest cyber attack, yet the culprit was the very software designed to protect us. Even iconic landmarks such as the Times Square billboards were offline. Almost no one was immune. July 19, 2024 I had just laid down at 1:30 AM, and was just about ready to close my eyes.…
AppLocker Recovery
In under 2 hours, I determined the root cause and developed a solution for an unexpected AppLocker issue that was bricking 100+ devices. I solved this faster than Microsoft’s official level 2 / level 3 support. The cause was a conflict between AppLocker and an improperly tested browser control mechanism that a coworker pushed out…
Azure Conditional Access Error
Fixed a conditional access error* caused by security enabling an untested conditional access policy on the user device level and the Entra Connect sync user for one of the domains having insufficient privileges, caused by the msds-KeyCredentialLink attribute to not being writable. The security team had enabled Entra Seamless SSO and had blocked unmanaged devices…
Entra/Intune Sync Issue Resolution – Full Story
For over a month, our team had been fighting with an Entra Connect synchronization problem that was preventing 40 workstations from properly enrolling in Microsoft Intune. Two or three other team members had several hours each over the past few weeks troubleshooting – checking network connectivity, reviewing firewall rules, reinstalling the Entra Connect service, even…
Fixed Hybrid Intune Sync on 40 PCs
Fixed an Entra Connect Sync issue that was preventing 40 machines from enrolling into Intune properly. The issue was caused by the Sync service user having insufficient permissions to modify the msds-ConsistencyGUID AD attribute. Others had spent over 18 hours troubleshooting with no progress CONTINUE THE STORY HERE to find out how I solved this problem…
Rescued Migration of Critical DB server
Rescued the stalled migration of a critical physical on-prem database server after the MAC addressed changed which caused the migration agent to crash due to its utilization of the MAC address to generate the UUID. MAC Address change was caused the active NIC on a bonded interface changing from the secondary back to primary. FIND…
Database Server Migration Rescue – Full Story
None of this was supposed to happen, the AWS migration was supposed to be straightforward. I had just restarted the server to apply a last minute security patch per our protocol. We had successfully moved dozens of servers to the cloud using this same process over the past several months. But on May 9th, 2025…
Cloud Migration
Resolved complex networking issues between the on-prem and multi account AWS environment during the second phase of an on-prem to AWS migration during a very restricted time window, ensuring a smooth transition to the cloud.
Network Share Reporting
Created a reporting script to show user & group access to folders & shares. Had developed plans to enable the script to automatically run and automatically send the results in an email, when triggered by receiving an email from the reporting team.