SfB 2019 Server Update – June 2023

It’s been a while since we’ve seen an update to Skype for Business Server 2019, October’s 7.0.2046.409.

Today we see build 7.0.2046.521, which updated six components on my Standard Edition Front-End.

What’s Fixed?

“KB” numbers seem to have gone the way of the dodo…

What’s New?

This article announces the arrival of the Emergency Mitigation Service, with some companion commandlets.

Microsoft takes security very seriously and we continue to work hard to protect your systems and data from cyber threats and to comply with evolving regulations. In line with this, we have introduced the Skype for Business Server Emergency Mitigation Service to help protect your servers from potential threats. This service provides a temporary and interim mitigation until you can install an update that fixes the vulnerability.

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Another chapter ends…

I returned these number plates to the motor registry recently, in preparation for our new car’s arrival.

I found it quite poignant that the introduction of Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging (EX-07-UM) marked the beginning of the Microsoft chapter of my career, and now that I’ve retired, I’m also retiring the plates that accompanied me throughout.

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Packet sniffing your UniFi Access Points

We had a new Widget arrive in the house recently, and it required a connection to the Wi-Fi network. It was duly connected to the untrusted ‘IoT’ network, where it’s denied Internet access by default. It WASN’T happy.

The supplier assured me it *didn’t* require Internet access, so I set about finding out what was going on, and Wireshark was going to figure into that equation.

A brief web search revealed that the Ubiquiti UniFi Access Points have “tcpdump” installed, and in conjunction with PowerShell and WinSCP I had my answers. Here’s how I did it.

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Review: Zennio Tecla XL pushbuttons for KNX

The Zennio Tecla XL

Late last year the Ivory Egg crew returned from Light + Building 2022 in Frankfurt with news of the Zennio Tecla XL, and it caught my eye.

What’s not to love about the Aussie mounting compatibility, the sleek, sexy look, the distinct capacitive buttons, and – as I was to find out – the proximity detection?
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Our quest for the perfect light switch

We’re not even twelve months into our KNX journey, but we already have devices from over ten manufacturers of KNX gear all happily coexisting throughout the house.

One of the first decisions we had to make was the choice of light switches. We had a few criteria, the main one being that the switches needed to fit within a standard Australian mounting plate, as our installation was a retrofit. Given the house has plaster walls we could have patched all the rectangular holes, re-painted and gone with Euro-style switches in their square mounts, but we decided that was a bridge too far – at least initially.

We also wanted distinct buttons, so that invalidated some of the touch-based models with their ‘secret’ hot-spots.

Those sorts of things are perhaps fine if you’re the only people who’ll ever touch them, but of course reality introduces guests, cat-sitters, cleaners and tradies, and none of those want to sit through a site induction training course before you’ll let them go to the bathroom.
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Review: Brightgreen Day Shift LEDs

I’ve written before about the lousy state of the lighting in the new home we bought last year. Fortunately we moved in during Summer, so the days were long and the need for lighting minimal.

Early in the research phase someone introduced me to the concept of Human Centric Lighting, and I was hooked. That “led” (sorry) to quite a lot of research, and ultimately the only player with a suitable product in the market here in Oz was Brightgreen, and its “D700” family of LEDs.

Human Centric Lighting?

You mightn’t have heard of Human Centric Lighting [HCL] called by that name, but you’ve most likely already encountered an application of it.
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Get-PowerWallData.py

Following the installation of our solar panels and Tesla PowerWall2 last year, we’ve been on a mission to add all the monitoring and measurement that we can conceive.

Two earlier posts focussed on the Enphase micro-inverters:

Now we have a script that focusses on the PowerWall: Get-PowerWallData.py. Like the others, this script feeds raw data into PRTG.

Features

This script uses the Tesla API to query your PowerWall/Gateway, so it’s retrieving the same data that you see in the Tesla app on your phone. Benefits of this are having your own personal copy/log of that data under your own control, and importantly, you can now *alarm* on any parameters that fall out of your expected range, or do so for too long a period.

We do however grab a couple of values that aren’t in the app:
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SfB 2015 Server Update – December 2022

This security update for SfBS 2015 is build 6.0.9319.842, up from July’s 6.0.9319.634. Despite the strange jump of over TWO HUNDRED build numbers it updated only two components on my Standard Edition Front-End and delivers only one fix.

What’s Fixed?

  • Kb 5022533 Response Group Service Crashes in Skype for Business Server 2015

What’s New?

Nothing noted. No cmdlets have been added to the SfB module in this update.

What’s Changed?

There’s a new pre-req’s section – see below. Otherwise, nothing noted.

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Get-EnphaseData.py

I recently introduced a script that monitors the Enphase solar setup we have here. This post is about the companion script that adds reporting down to an individual panel level.

  • Get-EnphaseProduction.py. Queries the installation for an overview of production and consumption.
  • Get-EnphaseData.py – this post. Queries the generation data for all of the invidual panels/micro-inverters.
  • Get-EnphaseProduction-v7.py – the v7 version of this post. You’ll need this when your firmware is updated.
  • Get-EnphaseData-v7.py – the v7 version of this post. You’ll need this when your firmware is updated.

Features

This script has the sole purpose of querying panel/inverter data from our Enphase solar system on a per-panel level. This enables us to confirm that all the panels are working properly and potentially identify any panels that aren’t pulling their weight.

As well as individual panel outputs, the script calculates and returns “panel range”. This is simply the difference between the highest and lowest output numbers. In normal operation, this number shouldn’t be very high as every panel pointing in the same direction should be generating roughly the same amount of power. If any of the panels drops output, the panel range number will increase. This will allow you to set up an alarm if any of the panel outputs drop for an extended amount of time. (Obviously you don’t want that time to be too short, as it would false-trigger on slow-moving clouds shading one or more of the panels while the rest remain in full sunlight.)

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