Connecting on-premises Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft 365. Azure AD Connect, password hash sync, pass-through authentication, Seamless SSO, conditional access, and the pre-flight that makes the first sync run quietly.
14 articles • follow them in order
Standard Active Directory password policy enforces shape — minimum length, complexity, history, age. Shape doesn’t catch P@ssw.rd or Admin@123: both pass complexity; both are in every credential-stuffing wordlist on the…
Part 1 of this series covered the architecture and prerequisites — the cloud-versus-on-prem split, the proxy-as-egress design, the network ports, the licensing matrix, the FRS-versus-DFSR Sysvol gotcha. With those out…
The previous two posts in this series stood up Microsoft Entra Password Protection on an on-prem AD forest — Part 1 walked the architecture and prerequisites, Part 2 walked the…
Microsoft Entra Connect is the bridge between your on-prem Active Directory and your Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) tenant. It runs on a Windows server in your environment and handles…
Part 1 of this series covered the prerequisites for installing Microsoft Entra Connect. Now Part 2: stage the installer files. The catch — we want TWO versions, not one. The…
Part 3 of the Entra Connect series. We’ve covered the prerequisites (Part 1) and staged the installer files (Part 2). Now we need a server to run Entra Connect on.…
Your internal AD domain is something like infotechninja.local or corp.internal. Microsoft can’t verify those domains in the cloud because they’re not real internet domains. If you sync as-is, every user…
The TLS configuration from Part 3 got the server ready. The UPN suffix work in Part 4 got the user identities ready. There’s one more gate before the Entra Connect…
Before walking the actual Entra Connect installer in the next post, take a step back and understand what you’re installing. The Entra Connect “Sync Engine” is more than a single…
Six posts of preparation; one post of actual install. With the prereqs validated (Part 1), installer staged (Part 2), TLS 1.2 enforced (Part 3), UPN suffixes fixed (Part 4), AD…
The first thing any Entra Connect troubleshooting call asks: which version are you running. Microsoft’s release cadence is brisk; minor sync issues often turn out to be known bugs in…
You inherited an Entra Connect deployment with no documentation. Or you suspect there’s a rogue EC install somewhere on your network. Or you’re auditing for compliance and need to know…
Domain-joined users sign in to Windows in the morning, hit a Microsoft 365 URL in the browser, and… get prompted for their password. Why? They’re already authenticated on this machine;…
You set up an OU filter at install time per Part 7. Months later, you need to change it — new OUs were added that should sync, old OUs got…
