Azure AD

Conditional Access Stuck on “Loading…”

Posted on by Adam Fowler

There’s currently an issue with configuring Conditional Access via Azure Active Directory. There’s an open ticket with Microsoft Support, with no ETA at the time of writing.

The issue:  When trying to configure a new policy for Conditional Access against an Azure Active Directory application, the ‘New’ page gets stuck loading. I’ve tested this on multiple browsers, tenants, internet connections, computers, and had Microsoft support confirm.

The path to doing this is from the Azure portal – Azure Active Directory > Enterprise Applications > choose your application > Conditional Access > New policy:

The Workaround: Thankfully it’s not a showstopper, as there’s another way to get to Conditional Access and it works fine. Instead of going via a specific app first, you can just go via Azure Active Directory > Conditional Access > New policy. Also Azure Active Directory > Enterprise Applications > Conditional Access > New policy works, it’s just an extra click to the same screen.

Points to take note of – if something’s broken, try accessing the same function from a different route of click-through links and it might work another way. Also, log these issues with Microsoft Support as overall the support is pretty good and often the issue won’t be anything to do with you. Test different scenarios wherever possible too, and also asking the question on Twitter can get some extra attention!

Null Dynamic Membership Rules in Azure Active Directory

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Azure Active Directory has the ability to create Security Groups with Dynamic membership. This is great if you can apply logic to a group, as members will fall in and out of scope without any work required.

Microsoft have a great writeup on how it all works and how to create rules, however I’ve run into a scenario not covered in the documentation.

If you create a Dynamic membership rule and want to include only attributes that have no value, the term ‘null’ works fine. You can create your group or modify the rule without issue.
However, if your binary operator (the equals part in the example above) is set to ‘not’, it won’t work.
The use case I had for ‘not null’ was to have a group of users which only had employee numbers, which was an easy way of filtering out test accounts, service accounts and so on.

You’ll get this error:

Failed to create group

Failed to create group ‘groupname’. Dynamic membership rule validation error: Invalid operands found for operator.Invalid operands found for operator -not

The way to fix this is to go into the ‘Advanced Rule’ option and change the term ‘null’ to ‘$null’

Note that you can’t do this from the simple rule view, changing ‘null’ to ‘$null’ there results in the code looking like this:

(user.extensionAttribute1 -eq “$null”)

Where it should look like this, without the quotes:

(user.extensionAttribute1 -eq $null)

A simple fix, but something that’s not documented on the support page. Hope this helps anyone who runs into the same problem.

Azure AD DS Health Monitoring Agent Temp Files

Posted on by Adam Fowler

There’s a known issue with the Azure AD DS Health Monitoring Agent, which is a part of the Azure AD Connect Health offering from Microsoft.

I’m a big fan of this service, which after installing a small agent on each DC, will alert you of any issues such as replication failing, or a DC unavailable.

However, there’s a problem with how the agent handles its temporary files. As covered on this TechCommunity post, the utility creates a lot of temp files in C:\Windows\Temp locally on each DC. They’re 1/2KB each, but I see around 288 daily being generated. These are never cleaned up.

One one domain controller, since I’ve been running the utility from the 16th September 2016, there are now ~133,000 temporary files. The actual size of these log files is a small 90mb, but the space on disk due to how allocating blocks works, takes up 519MB. I’m going to assume there’s many factors that can change the size and number of log files.

Many people will have small drives for their DCs, and also having lots of files in a folder can cause weird performance issues.

The files are in a format such as 20160915T024226Z-20160915T031125Z-SERVERNAME-6acbd4cb99a1448d848298a59b6fc6e2.json.gz – so it’s easy to set up a daily scheduled task to delete anything older than a day. There’s a couple of examples on how to do this here.

Microsoft has advised this won’t be fixed anytime soon (at least Q3 2018 is what I’ve heard), so it’s worth checking out that C:\Windows\Temp folder and even doing a one time delete if it’s full of log files!

Zero-click Single Sign-On Without ADFS

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Login prompts to websites are a pain. Enterprise employees these days expect to have a single sign-on experience (meaning the same username/password everywhere) and a minimal amount of logging in to systems each day.

It’s a very different from years ago where every system had it’s own unique login, and users got into the habit of synchronizing password changes when the regular password expiries hit (and I’m sure some companies still run this way), but it’s a problem IT as a whole has worked on for many years.

Microsoft has had a big focus in identity management for many years, with products such as FIM/MIM and ADFS along with the old faithful Active Directory, controlling and giving framework for authentication. The on-premises approach didn’t work for cloud based technologies though. Going to a site such as Office365.com will show an area to sign in:

Going back to the requirements of getting logged out of sites, or needing to log into each different Microsoft service is a pain and time sink for users. The original answer to this problem was ADFS. This works well, but requires the ADFS infrastructure to be set up, and needs to be highly available. If ADFS goes down, your users can no longer authenticate to Azure AD, which is what powers the identity management and authentication orchestration for Microsoft enterprise users (this includes Office 365).

More recently, another native solution was released – Pass Through Authentication for Azure AD Connect (Azure AD Connect being the service that syncs your on premises AD to Azure AD). This removes the requirement for entering a password to these Microsoft services which is great for users, but still requires the entry of the username (which in Azure AD, is the User Principal Name, and looks the same as an email address to confuse things more for users). It’s a good start, but still not the seamless authentication many users expect.

There is another way of providing zero-touch logins to Microsoft services without ADFS, which is Azure AD Domain Join. Windows 10 is a requirement here, but beyond that, the setup is quite easy if you’re already configured for Azure AD. Maurice Daly has written a great guide on this, which outlines all the requirements and steps to follow to be up and running. (Thanks Maurice for your help on this!)

Gotcha for myself: I found that I had an old version of the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell which didn’t have the get-msoldevice cmdlet at all, and had to download an updated version. I also updated the AzureRM module for good measure since it was also out of date, but shouldn’t have been a requirement.

This is a rather complex topic, so I’ve tried to give a fly-over view of the native options available. There’s also Smart Links which can speed up and improve the user experience.

If you’re on Azure AD and Windows 10, give Azure AD Domain Join a try. It may save you the hassle of building and maintaining an ADFS server, and give your users a better experience overall.

Azure Active Directory – Assigning Groups to Applications in PowerShell

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Azure Active Directory Applications have been around for a while, but it’s I’ve found it hard to find good information on them beyond the biggest benefit of Marketplace Apps.

Along with my Azure AD B2B journey (still in preview at time of writing), the option of pushing out something like a SharePoint Online site as an app is one of the jigsaw pieces required to make the whole B2B process work – as a version of the apps page is displayed as the default link to anyone who accepts an Azure AD B2B invite and logs in for the first time.

MyApps – an externally invited user will only see the apps they have access to (by default, none)

I’m trying to gloss over details here, as there’s a lot of steps with different parts of the Microsoft world to get a process automated end to end for inviting external users to a SharePoint Online site – but the last step of assigning a user or group to an application has no documentation I could find, that showed how to achieve this via PowerShell.

All I want to do here, is create an Application in Azure AD, then assign a group to it. Members of the group will then see the application on MyApps.

Two different modules are required – Azure Active Directory V2 PowerShell module and Azure Resource Manager.

What we can do with these two modules is first create the application with the New-AzureRMADApplication command:

New-AzureRmADApplication -DisplayName "SharePoint Online Site A" -HomePage "https://contoso.sharepointonline.com/sitea" -IdentifierUris "https://contoso.sharepointonline.com/sitea"

Easy, now you have an application that will point to the URL entered in Azure Active Directory. Assigning a group to it is a bit trickier…

First, a few values need to be obtained:

$app = Get-AzureRmADApplication | where displayname -eq "SharePoint Online Site A"
$appid = $app.ApplicationId
$fullgroup = get-msolgroup -all | where displayname -eq "SharePoint Online Site A"

This is getting the two objects as variables – the Application itself, and the group that you want to add onto it.

Then a new Service Principal needs to be created based on the Application, as this is required when adding the group onto the application:

New-AzureADServicePrincipal -AppId $appid

Another variable is needed, which is the new Service Principal we just created:

$servicePrincipal = Get-AzureADServicePrincipal -Filter "appId eq '$appId'"

Finally, we can assign the group to the application:

New-AzureADGroupAppRoleAssignment -objectid $fullgroup.objectid -principalid $fullgroup.objectid -resourceid $serviceprincipal.objectid -id ([Guid]::Empty)

You can check that this has applied by the Azure Active Directory portal too, by going to your Active Directory section, choosing ‘Applications’ and finding your app, then go into ‘users and groups’ and find the group. You should see a ‘yes’ in the assigned field.

If there’s any interest in documenting the entire SharePoint Online and Azure AD B2B invite process and script, let me know. It’s a great way of sharing data with clients via a portal.

Update 15th June 2017

Microsoft made a change with the IdentifierURI field, which is also called AppID if you view it in the Azure portal. Previously, it could be any unique URL, it just has to be unique amongst your apps (as to why it has to be a URL at all, I couldn’t get an answer on). Now, it can be anything as long as it’s not sharepoint.com or dynamics.com as they’ve reserved those for other reasons. My example above, and what I’d been using in production was variants of sharepoint.com – as the unique URI might as well be the actual URL of the site. If you use a URL that’s not allowed anymore, you’ll get the error:

New-AzureRMADApplication : Operation returned an invalid status code ‘BadRequest’