John Savill'ss FAQs on IT Pro Today Hero

FAQs: Learn how to assign roles available with Azure, new options for securing Azure services with IaaS services and installing additional Linux distributions with WSL.

Three times a week, John Savill tackles your most pressing IT questions.

Three times a week (Monday/Wednesday/Friday), John Savill tackles your most pressing IT questions.

Read through the FAQ archives, or send him your questions via email.

Today: Learn how to assign roles available with Azure, new options for securing Azure services with IaaS services and installing additional Linux distributions with WSL.


 
Q. I'm trying to grant an Azure AD user a certain role but I can't find that role in the Azure AD portal. Where do I look?

A. Many user roles are specific to certain services and don't show as roles under the General Azure AD properties. Instead, you need to use a specific administration interface to grant those roles. As an example: To grant the Security Administrator role, you would use the Office 365 Security & Compliance admin center (available from the main Office 365 admin center). Once in that area select Permissions and a large number of roles are available.

So for your user situation, you'll want to go to the administrator roles directory, which gives an overview of the roles (like billing admin, compliance admin) and how to manage them.

 

Q. What are Virtual Network service endpoints?

A. Azure has many types of services beyond virtual machines. While virtual machines are created inside a virtual network, many other types of service cannot integrate directly with a virtual network (although that many can integrate, like app services deployed to an App Service Environment) and instead have a public endpoint.

Many services with a public endpoint have a firewall that enables the endpoints connecting to be restricted to a certain IP range. Virtual Network service endpoints enable specific subnets in a virtual network to be made available to specific Azure services such as SQL or storage (with the list expanding over time). Once these service endpoints are created, the firewall solution can be configured to enable connectivity only from those specific subnets via its endpoint, locking down the service.


Q. How can I install additional Linux distributions on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)?

A. While the WSL initially provides an Ubuntu based shell, it is possible to add additional ones, so long as you are running Windows 10 version 1709 or above. Follow these steps:

  1. Open the Microsoft Store application
  2. Search for WSL
  3. Click the Get the apps link under the section for Linux on Windows
  4. Additional distributions such as openSUSE and SLES will be available to install (Windows Subsystem for Linux must already be install via Turn Windows feature on or off)
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