[Aside] Various Azure links

My blog posting has taken a turn for the worse. Mainly coz I have been out of country and since returning I am busy reading up on Azure monitoring.

Anyways, some quick links to tabs I want to close now but which will be useful for me later –

  • A funny thing with Azure monitoring (OMS/ Log Analytics) is that it can’t just do simple WMI queries against your VMs to check if a service is running. Crazy, right! So you have to resort to tricks like monitor the event logs to see any status messages. Came across this blog post with a neat idea of using performance counters. I came across that in turn from this blog post that has a different way of using the event logs.
  • We use load balancers in Azure and I was thinking I could tap into their monitoring signals (from the health probes) to know if a particular server/ service is up or down. In a way it doesn’t matter if a particular server/ service is down coz there won’t be a user impact coz of the load balancer, so what I am really interested in knowing is whether a particular monitored entity (from the load balancer point of view) is down or not. But turns out the basic load balancer cannot log monitoring signals if it is for internal use only (i.e. doesn’t have a public IP). You either need to assign it a public IP or use the newer standard load balancer.
  • Using OMS to monitor and send alert for BSOD.
  • Using OMS to track shutdown events.
  • A bit dated, but using OMS to monitor agent health (has some queries in the older query language).
  • A useful list of log analytics query syntax (it’s a translation from old to new style queries actually but I found it a good reference)

Now for some non-Azure stuff which I am too lazy to put in a separate blog post:

  • A blog post on the difference between application consistent and crash consistent backups.
  • At work we noticed that ADFS seemed to break for our Windows 10 machines. I am not too clear on the details as it seemed to break with just one application (ZScaler). By way of fixing it we came across this forum post which detailed the same symptoms as us and the fix suggested there (Set-ADFSProperties -IgnoreTokenBinding $True) did the trick for us. So what is this token binding thing?
    • Token Binding seems to be like cookies for HTTPS. I found this presentation to be a good explanation of it. Basically token binding binds your security token (like cookies or ADFS tokens) to the TLS session you have with a server, such that if anyone were to get hold of your cookie and try to use it in another session it will fail. Your tokens are bound to that TLS session only. I also found this medium post to be a good techie explanation of it (but I didn’t read it properly*). 
    • It seems to be enabled on the client side from Windows 10 1511 and upwards.
    • I saw the same recommendation in these Microsoft Docs on setting up Azure stack.

Some excerpts from the medium post (but please go and read the full one to get a proper understanding). The excerpt is mostly for my reference:

Most of the OAuth 2.0 deployments do rely upon bearer tokens. A bearer token is like ‘cash’. If I steal 10 bucks from you, I can use it at a Starbucks to buy a cup of coffee — no questions asked. I do not want to prove that I own the ten dollar note.

OAuth 2.0 recommends using TLS (Transport Layer Security) for all the interactions between the client, authorization server and resource server. This makes the OAuth 2.0 model quite simple with no complex cryptography involved — but at the same time it carries all the risks associated with a bearer token. There is no second level of defense.

OAuth 2.0 token binding proposal cryptographically binds security tokens to the TLS layer, preventing token export and replay attacks. It relies on TLS — but since it binds the tokens to the TLS connection itself, anyone who steals a token cannot use it over a different channel.

Lastly, I came across this awesome blog post (which too I didn’t read properly* – sorry to myself!) but I liked a lot so here’s a link to my future self – principles of token validation.

 

* I didn’t read these posts properly coz I was in a “troubleshooting mode” trying to find out why ADFS broke with token binding. If I took more time to read them I know I’d get side tracked. I still don’t know why ADFS broke, but I have an idea.