Category Archives: Cool Tools

Cool Tools – DomainHelp.com

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Easy DNS has long been a favorite of mine for domain, DNS, and light-weight mail services. The prices are great, service is excellent, and they’re Canadian, eh.

Recently, they’ve expanded their whois tool to a new domain, domainhelp.com. It’s still in beta, but I’ve already put it to good use. There are a number of tools including classic whois domain lookup, DNS and IP (v4 and v6) lookups, DNS resolver, RBL checks, SPF wizard, a “what is my IP” function, and more.

Check them out at https://domainhelp.com

Cool Tool – What is My Tenant ID

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In an organization running O365, every once in a while you’ll need to jump through hoops inside O365 or Powershell to find your tenant ID. While it’s not that terrible, it’s certainly not speedy. If you’re a Microsoft Partner, you often need the Tenant ID for various Microsoft paperwork. It can be a hassle to collect this from your customer, or get credentials setup early enough in the engagement process with them. For you, this is a lifesaver!

The brilliant folks at ShareGate came up with http://www.whatismytenantid.com. Enter any domain name associated with your tenant – including the .onmicrosoft.com:

Whatismytenantid

and a few nanoseconds later:

Whatismytenantid2

Note that if your browser window is smallish, you may get an add that covers the ID and Copy to clipboard button, so hit maximize.

Cool Tool – UCDialPlans

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If you’ve ever had the need to build a Skype for Business (or Teams!) dial plan, or sort out the regex for a number range, http://www.ucdialplans.com is your friend.

All around good Canadian kid Ken Lasko has been running this site for years. Got PRIs and need to route 7 digits to the telco vs 10 when it’s a local call? No problem, that’s just a tick box to let the optimizer know that it needs to dip into telco databases and see what exchanges are in your calling area. Internal extensions, trunk codes (9 for an outside line) and more are available.

Working with Cisco or AudioCodes gear? It can do those, too. There’s just so much stuff here, you have to go check it out (and be sure to donate a few bucks so Ken can keep building the awesomeness):

Lasko

The site is well laid out and easily navigate by scrolling or the menu at the tab. Check it out, I’m sure you’ll find something useful there.

 

Cool Tool – Regex101

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If you’re doing voice with Teams or Skype for Business, chances are good that you need to do regex. While some regex’s can get awfully complex, there are some basic ones that look like they should be easy, but are deceptively complex. If you’re writing your own regex, you should be testing it with at least these values:

  • The first number in the range
  • One less than the first number in the  range
  • The last number in the range
  • One more than the last number in the range
  • A number somewhere in the middle of the range

Well, that sounds like no fun at all if you have to place 5 test phone calls and check logs to make sure things worked. Sure SfB Server has some testing tools build into the control panel, but what about if you’re working on a Ribbon SBC or Microsoft Phone System?

Enter one of my favourite sites, http://www.regex101.com. Pop in your regular expression, enter your test value in the “test string” field, and if it turns green you’ve matched. On the right, you get a breakdown on the various elements in your regex, what each means, and if these individual bits match, and there’s a quick reference too – a great way to learn regex!

Here’s an example. The regex ^(12\d{2})$ is for the range 1200-1299, and I’m testing that 1299 is a match:

regex101

Pretty awesome stuff!

 

Cool Tool – Find duplicate LineURIs

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Every once in a while – and by that, I mean ALL. THE. TIME. – I run into a situation where a number that I’ve been asked to provision as a LineURI for a SfB endpoint is already in use:

Failed

“Filter failed to return unique result” has got to be one of the most frustrating errors that you can receive. At least it doesn’t tell you to contact your system administrator…

Sometimes this is easy to figure out by searching for that number in the User Search section of the Control Panel:

UserSearch

And other times it’s not, because the number is hiding, assigned to one of the following:

  • User LineURI
  • User PrivateLine
  • CsAnalogDevice
  • CsCommonAreaPhone
  • CsExUmContact
  • CsDialInConferencingAccessNumber
  • CsTrustedApplicationEndpoint
  • CsRgsWorkflow
  • CsMeetingRoom LineURI
  • CsMeetingRoom PrivateLine

And you know what you don’t want to do? You don’t to have to dig out PowerShell and search all of these manually. What you need is a script to do this for you, and while there are a couple out there, the one by Lasse Wedø is my favorite.

It’s comprehensive, well-written, has nicely formatted output, and has a tonne of parameters available if you want to do a more complex search. The simplest form of search looks like this:

PS Search

which seems just about right to me. Download the script and give it a try next time you run into duplicate number issues.

Patching Without an Internet Connection

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In some organizations, allowing servers to have direct access to the Internet isn’t permitted. Or, it could be you have an isolated lab and need to patch your machines. WSUS is great, but not always possible to implement.

There are a couple of utilities available that help with this. The first is quite excellent, http://www.portableupdate.com/

The second one I haven’t personally used http://www.wsusoffline.net/

Either of these tools should get you patched, without needing to worry about Internet connectivity from your machines.

 

Cool tool – MAdCaP manager for analog and common area phones

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Let’s face it, creating Common Area Phones (CAPs) and Analog Phones in Lync is annoying. Managing them is even more annoying. Greig Sheridan has the answer with MAdCaP (“Manage Analog Devices & Common Area Phones”).

MAdCaP allows you to create and edit Common Area Phones and Analog Devices as the name implies. This includes the little details like setting the correct dial plan, voice policy, client policy, and PINs.

This is a great tool for an Admin who’s in charge of phones, but has zero idea what PowerShell is. I’ve also found it handy at the end of a very long day when my brain simply won’t do PowerShell commands.

Cool tool – IIS Crypto

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Every once in a while, a Lync admin gets to experience the true horror of changing crypto settings. More often than not, this is through following a series of registry edits found online, either on TechNet or a helpful looking blog.

IIS Crypto is a tool that allows you to fiddle with the protocols, cyphers, hashes, key exchanges and cypher suite order, all in a nicely put together GUI. Better yet, there are templates that’ll set your server to Best Practices, PCI, FIPS140-2, and Windows Defaults. That last one comes in really handy when that helpful looking blog turns out to be not so helpful, and your notes on what keys you changed in RegEdit aren’t so clear.

Cool tool – Mirror Manager

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Most Lync admins aren’t closet SQL admins, and things like “mirror” and “witness” sound more like “dragon” and “bear” than “puppies” and “beer”. When you throw in other mirroring language that’s eerily similar – principal, primary, secondary and mirror I’m look at you – it can be too much. Thankfully, James Cussen has whipped up an excellent tool that will display which database is being used, and with a few clicks, it whips up the PowerShell for you to move things around. This is a great tool to have handy for a Disaster Recovery scenario, in case the person executing the DR plan isn’t a PowerShell, Lync, and Mirror guru.