Archive for the ‘Azure’ Category

How To: Access Azure MFA Settings and Trusted IPs Without Azure Subscription

Posted: July 7, 2017 in Azure, Microsoft, Uncategorized
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Have you been wondering how to access the Azure Multi-Factor Authentication Settings in the Azure Classic Portal without first having to create an Azure account? I figured this out a few days ago, having an Office 365 tenant, and wanting to use the EMS and Azure Active Directory Premium features. Following Microsoft’s instructions, it said to go to the Azure Classic Portal. The problem is, Office 365 doesn’t include an Azure subscription, it just includes Azure Active Directory, which you manage through the “modern” Azure portal. Unfortunately, the Trusted IPs and MFA capabilities are managed through the Azure Classic Portal, which you can’t directly access without an Azure subscription.

So, here’s what you do:

  1. Go to portal.office.com
  2. Click Admin to open the admin tools
  3. In the search box, type MFA
  4. Select the Multi-factor authentication search result
  5. Click the link to open the Manage multi-factor authentication link
  6. There you go – manage MFA in your Azure AD to your heart’s content!

 

Custom DLLs not loading in Azure? Might be a PATH issue… Here’s a fix.

Posted: September 25, 2015 in Azure, Microsoft, Programming, Software Development
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I recently ran into a need to use the LAME MP3 encoder in a customer’s website. Problem was, once I deployed to Azure, I received an error of “Unable to load DLL libmp3lame.32.dll”. Uh oh! “But it’s in the bin folder!” I screamed silently at Starbucks. So, I binged the issue and found a good answer on StackOverflow. I’m sharing here because it helped unstick me, and I imagine others may be running to this issue with libraries other than LAME.

I ended up adding the function to my Global.asax, in addition to importing namespaces System.IO and System.Linq:

/// <summary>
/// Updates PATH variable in hosting instance to allow referring to items in this project's /bin folder.
/// Very helpful with Azure.
/// </summary>
public static void CheckAddBinPath()
{
    // find path to 'bin' folder
    var binPath = Path.Combine(new string[] { AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "bin" });
    // get current search path from environment
    var path = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PATH") ?? "";
 
    // add 'bin' folder to search path if not already present
    if (!path.Split(Path.PathSeparator).Contains(binPath, StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))
    {
        path = string.Join(Path.PathSeparator.ToString(), new string[] { path, binPath });
        Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", path);
    }
}

Then in Application start I simply added:

// Sometimes files aren't loaded properly from bin. Hint to the app to load from /bin, too.
CheckAddBinPath();

I hope that helps!