I have multiple Azure Subscriptions configured with my Microsoft Account (formerly Live ID) Some time back couple of subscriptions were disabled due to excessive usage, which is fine. However, at this time when I tried to manage the same using PowerShell I was getting the following error every time I tried to Import the Publish Settings file using Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile command.

I ran the following command

PS C:\> Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile -PublishSettingsFile 'C:\Final\<SUBSCRIPTION_NAME>.publishsettings'

I did not understand what was the problem around the same as every time I use the same method & it works. But never I faced any issue. I checked on to the management portal just to verify if it has created proper certificates. Here is the output.

I then decided to search online to see what was the problem. I found a link that explains the same behavior.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuremanagement/thread/93750a76-9f87-4b00-ad4d-4908cf55c12d

Interestingly the answer suggested by Neil was appropriate. The subscription data was stored earlier in the following folder C:\Users\aviraj\AppData\Roaming\Windows Azure Powershell

And that was the problem as the data included my disabled subscription details as well, which are not available in my newly downloaded Publish Settings File.

SOLUTION

Just delete all the files in the folder C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\Windows Azure Powershell

And try to re-run the same command Import-PublishSettingsFile & voila problem is solved

Enjoy!!

Hi IT Professionals,

I want to share with you a complete list of sessions/labs related to Management (System Center, Windows Intune, Hyper-V, MDOP, and MDT) from TechEd NA 2013. Thanks to Cleber Marques & our community for sharing the list

The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) is designed to help prevent hackers from gaining access to your system.
Software vulnerabilities and exploits have become an everyday part of life. Virtually every product has to deal with them and consequently, users are faced with a stream of security updates. For users who get attacked before the latest updates have been applied or who get attacked before an update is even available, the results can be devastating: malware, loss of PII, etc.
Security mitigation technologies are designed to make it more difficult for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in a given piece of software. EMET allows users to manage these technologies on their system and provides several unique benefits:
1. No source code needed: Until now, several of the available mitigations (such as Data Execution Prevention) have required for an application to be manually opted in and recompiled. EMET changes this by allowing a user to opt in applications without recompilation. This is especially handy for deploying mitigations on software that was written before the mitigations were available and when source code is not available.
2. Highly configurable: EMET provides a higher degree of granularity by allowing mitigations to be individually applied on a per process basis. There is no need to enable an entire product or suite of applications. This is helpful in situations where a process is not compatible with a particular mitigation technology. When that happens, a user can simply turn that mitigation off for that process.
3. Helps harden legacy applications: It’s not uncommon to have a hard dependency on old legacy software that cannot easily be rewritten and needs to be phased out slowly. Unfortunately, this can easily pose a security risk as legacy software is notorious for having security vulnerabilities. While the real solution to this is migrating away from the legacy software, EMET can help manage the risk while this is occurring by making it harder to hackers to exploit vulnerabilities in the legacy software.
4. Ease of use: The policy for system wide mitigations can be seen and configured with EMET's graphical user interface. There is no need to locate up and decipher registry keys or run platform dependent utilities. With EMET you can adjust setting with a single consistent interface regardless of the underlying platform.
5. Ease of deploy: EMET comes with built-in support for enterprise deployment and configuration technologies. This enables administrators to use Group Policy or System Center Configuration Manager to deploy, configure and monitor EMET installations across the enterprise environment.
6. Ongoing improvement: EMET is a living tool designed to be updated as new mitigation technologies become available. This provides a chance for users to try out and benefit from cutting edge mitigations. The release cycle for EMET is also not tied to any product. EMET updates can be made dynamically as soon as new mitigations are ready
The toolkit includes several pseudo mitigation technologies aimed at disrupting current exploit techniques. These pseudo mitigations are not robust enough to stop future exploit techniques, but can help prevent users from being compromised by many of the exploits currently in use. The mitigations are also designed so that they can be easily updated as attackers start using new exploit techniques.

Below is a summary of the features and changes that are included with the EMET 4.0 release:
• Certificate Trust: considering the raise of PKI-related attacks, we decided to implement a configurable SSL Certificate Pinning to try to detect Man in the Middle attacks that leverage SSL/TLS certificates. The Certificate Trust feature in EMET is rule-based and allows to pin a specific SSL/TLS certificate to a trusted Root Certificate Authority.
• ROP mitigations and hardening: in the last Technical Preview release of EMET, we introduced some mitigations to try to stop ROP-based attacks by implementing some of the winner ideas of the BlueHat Prize contest. With this new EMET release we hardened the ROP and other mitigations to detect and stop novel attack techniques.
• Early Warning Program: this feature will allow EMET to send contextual data back to Microsoft, through the standard Windows Error Reporting channel, every time that an exploit has been detected and stopped. We are adding this feature to help us respond to new 0day exploits as soon as possible.
• Audit mode: if an exploit is detected, EMET will not terminate the attacked process but it will just report the attack and let the process continue. This mode is only applicable to certain mitigations, for example the anti-ROP ones, that detect the attack when the process is not already in a crashed state. This feature is useful for enterprise customers for testing purposes and to spot false-positives and app-compat problems without compromising the user experience.
EMET 4.0 also includes bug fixes and UI changes to improve the overall user experience. Also, at the end of the installation, EMET will offer the user to automatically apply recommended settings to protect Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat/Reader, and Oracle Java, as well as a pre-defined set of rules for the Certificate Trust feature that will monitor the main Microsoft and other popular online services. More information are available in the User Guide, available in the EMET installation folder.
Please remember that EMET 4.0 requires .NET Framework 4, and in order to protect Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 you need to install KB2790907 – a mandatory AppCompat update that has been released on March 12th.

KB Articles: KB2458544

EMET BLOG ANNOUNCEMENT http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2013/06/17/emet-4-0-now-available-for-download.aspx

DOWNLOAD HERE

Many customers begin their virtualization journeys’ by virtualizing the low intensity, less critical workloads, such as File & Print Servers, or Web Servers, but as customer confidence in virtualization grows, customers need to understand the impact of virtualization, from a performance, scalability and reliability perspective, on their more mission-critical, tier 1 and tier 2 applications and workloads, like email & collaboration systems, databases, and CRM systems.

With Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, Microsoft has brought to market a high performance, scalable, robust, and cost-effective virtualization platform which allows customers to virtualize these mission-critical workloads with confidence. In addition, with System Center 2012 SP1, Microsoft provides customers with comprehensive management of their infrastructure, from accelerating deployment, through to providing deep insight into health and performance to keep your key applications and workloads running at their best.

On this page, you’ll find information on the performance of key workloads when virtualized on Hyper-V, and in addition, links to further information and guidance on best practices for virtualizing and managing these workloads.

Visit here to download all the relevant content http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/datacenter/virtualization-enterprise-applications.aspx

Introduces Windows Azure for developers and IT pros. Summarizes benefits such as global coverage and extensive language support. Provides a description of current services by category: app services, data services, compute, networking, and store. Depicts common uses including Cloud Services, Virtual Machines, Web Sites, Mobile Services, and Media Services. The poster is intended to be printed and measures 26" x 39”.

DOWNLOAD HERE