All of the parts I ordered came in this afternoon, so I took the XPS apart again and upgraded pretty much everything in it…
It’s now got the fans out of an Alienware Aurora r-series computer in it, which required a PWM fan splitter, because there’s only one fan header on the motherboard for Dell reasons. I got a nice Silverstone splitter at Microcenter for $7 and set up the top fan to report the tach. The front fan doesn’t report its tach and just gets the PWM signal the motherboard is sending to the top fan… But it works.
I installed the i9-9900kf and the CPU cooler out of a Precision workstation, which is a snug fit but I got it in there.
Then there’s the new modular 850 watt Corsair PSU which has three cables plugged into it; motherboard, supplemental CPU power, and PCIe for the video card… I stripped out the various SATA cabling and the 3.5″ drive cages just to unclutter things a bit in there.
I also got the Aorus Wifi / Bluetooth card working and am using my Apple AirPods Max as I type…
This all took about two hours, including the round trip to Microcenter. And just as I got the machine up and running I got a bunch of emails from Microsoft regarding the AD-to-Azure (Entra ID) system I use to bridge internal and cloud credentials – and how everything was going to stop working on the 1st if I didn’t upgrade my AD server to at least Server 2019…
Yep, four days notice… Thanks Microsoft.
So the remainder of my evening was figuring out how to divorce my local AD from Azure… The way I look at it, having to manage two sets of credentials is less of an ask than a quarter million bucks to update my entire infrastructure.
Anyway, my AD is still 2008r2 because it still works and I haven’t found a reason to spend a small fortune on M$ licensing fees – again. But this added a lot of complexity to the divorce proceedings because Microsoft moves the goalposts every 5 minutes… So I had to engineer a way to get 2008r2 PowerShell to talk to today’s version of Microsoft’s repositories so that I could install the modules needed to talk to today’s version of Azure and both turn off sync and enable web-management of the O365 accounts.
It looked like this:
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
(This enables PowerShell 5.1 on 2008r2 to speak TLS 1.2...)
Install-Module -Name PowerShellGet -Force
(Install the thing that lets you install things...)
Install-Module -Name Az -Scope CurrentUser -Repository PSGallery -force
(Basically update everything...)
Install-Module MSOnline
(The piece I actually needed...)
Install_module AzureAD
(The piece I needed to make the piece I needed work...)
Import-Module AzureAD
(Import AzureConnect's configuration so we know what instances to talk to at Microsoft)
Connect-MsolService
(Everything is 2FA now, so this brings up the MS 2FA login page to acquire a token)
Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled -EnableDirSync $false
(And finally we get to the divorce proceedings...)And with that taken care of I’ll get a whole hour to play some Baldur’s Gate 3 before I need to hit the rack so I can get up and do it all again tomorrow…
I need a vacation.
Listening to "Prime Directive" by New Arcades