Don't skimp on resources for GHES for demo instances

I wanted to have a look at some GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) upgrade scenarios so decided to create a quick GHES install on my local test Hyper-V instance. Due to me skimping on resources, and making a typo, creating this instance was much harder than it should have been. The first issue was I gave it a tiny data disk, this was down to me making a typo in my GB to Bytes conversion when specifying the size....

June 16, 2022 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for can't add second outlook.com account to Outlook Desktop - requires non-existent PIN

I was recently trying to set up a copy of the Outlook desktop app with two outlook.com email accounts and hit a strange issue. I was able to add the first one without any problems, but when I tried to add the second one I got an error message asking for PIN, and most importantly on the same dialog showing the second outlook.com email address. This is confusing as I know of no way to set a PIN on an outlook....

June 10, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

On-Demand video available for May's 'Microsoft and GitHub DevOps Forum: DevSecOps'

Did you miss the ‘Microsoft and GitHub DevOps Forum: DevSecOps’ event I presented at earlier in May? Well worry not, the on-demand stream is now available - here

May 17, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

More examples of using custom variables in Azure DevOps multi-stage YML

I have blogged in the past ( here , here and here) about the complexities and possible areas of confusion with different types of Azure DevOps pipeline variables. Well here is another example of how to use variables and what can trip you up. The key in this example is the scope of a variable, whether it is available outside a job and the syntax to access it Variables local to the Job So, if you create your variable as shown below...

May 5, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Updating the Azure Application client_secret used by Packer

As I have posted about previously, we create our Azure DevOps build agent images using the same Packer definitions as used by Microsoft. This time when I ran my Packer command to build an updated VHD I got the error Build ‘vhd’ errored after 135 milliseconds 708 microseconds: adal: Refresh request failed. Status Code = ‘401’. Response body: {“error”:“invalid_client”,“error_description”:“AADSTS7000222: The provided client secret keys for app ‘6425416f-aa94-4c20-8395-XXXXXXX’ are expired. Visit the Azure portal to create new keys for your app: https://aka....

May 3, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell