TN-5320: Microsoft Modern Desktop Administrator

 

 

 

 

Course Overview:

Learn how a Modern Desktop Administrators deploys, configures, secures, manage, and monitors devices and client applications in an enterprise environment. This is a hands-on, instructor led Bootcamp focusing on the real world responsibilities of a Modern Desktop Administrator and covering the information needed for the certification exams, which are administered while attending.

If you’ve passed Exam 70-698: Configuring Windows 10 (retired March 31, 2019) you only need to take MD-101 to earn this new certification.

This certification is one of the workload administrator certification required for the Microsoft 365 Certified: Enterprise Administrator Expert certification.

Dates/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 10 Days

Course Content:

    • Module 01. Installing Windows
    • Module 02. Updating Windows
    • Module 03. Post-Installation Configuration and Personalization
    • Module 04. Configuring Peripherals and Drivers
    • Module 05. Configuring Networks
    • Module 06. Configuring Storage
    • Module 07. Managing Apps in Windows 10
    • Module 08. Configuring Authorization & Authentication
    • Module 09. Configuring Data Access and Usage
    • Module 10. Configuring Advanced Management Tools
    • Module 11. Supporting the Windows 10 Environment
    • Module 12. Troubleshooting the Windows OS
    • Module 13. Troubleshooting Files & Applications
    • Module 14. Troubleshooting Hardware and Drivers
    • Module 15. Planning an Operating System Deployment Strategy
    • Module 16. Implementing Windows 10
    • Module 17. Managing Updates for Windows 10
    • Module 18. Device Enrollment
    • Module 19. Configuring Profiles
    • Module 20. Application Management
    • Module 21. Managing Authentication in Azure AD
    • Module 22. Managing Devices and Device Policies
    • Module 23. Managing Security

 

Prerequisites:

      • Microsoft 365 Certified Fundamentals (M-MS900)

Target Audience:

IT professionals who perform installation, configuration, general local management and maintenance of Windows 10 core services. Candidates may also be familiar with enterprise scenarios and cloud-integrated services.

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L-395: Accelerated Linux Administration and Utilities

Course Overview:

This course is extremely fast paced and for students that have already had UNIX or Linux training, or have not worked with Linux in several months or years.  This is NOT a course for students new to Linux and assumes the student requires a refresher before progressing through high end security courses that require dexterity on Linux.  RedHat and Ubuntu, VMware Virtual Machines, and BackTrack are used for the instruction of this course.  The student will acquire the skills to easily navigate the advanced VMware training environment and will be able to create scripts to manipulate and manage Linux.  The ulimate goals of the skills of this course is to provide the student the ability to automate through scripting BackTrack tools for offensive security, forensics, and defense.

Attendees to L-395: Accelerated Linux Administration and Utilities will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 5 days

Course Objectives:

Day 1 and 2: Unix Review and Unix  Utilities

  • Linux File System Archictecure and In-Depth discussion of Hard and Soft Links
  • Linux File, Directory, and Permissions Management
  • Linux  archives using tar and zip
  • Interacting with BASH
  • Review of Common Linux commands
  • Sorting files by line or field
  • Regular Expressions (meta character) with grep commands to locate specific lines in files
  • Grep, egrep extended metacharacters, combinations-lab advanced combinations- lab Sed
  • Basic commands- Lab, Advanced commands- Lab, Advanced scripting -Lab
  • Miscellaneous commands Tr, sort, cut, past, pr -Lab
  • Performing non-interactive editing tasks with the sed command
  • Writing simple sed scripts to perform complex editing tasks
  • Using awk variables & arrays to sort data
  • Employing awk programs to manipulate numeric & textual data
  • Performing formatted printing in awk
  • Writing simple awk programs to write reports from data files
  • Using built-in awk functions & defining new functions
  • Write awk programs that make decisions based on numeric or string comparisons (branches & loops)
 
Day 3 – Intro to Programming / Shell Scripting
  • Shell Review
  • Shell Interpretation of Quotes & Backslash
  • The Bash Shell
  • Shell's combined with UNIX utilities
  • Programming Basics
  • Data Constructs
  • Programming Looping
  • Your Environment
  • More on Parameters

Day 4 and 5 – Security Fundamentals, Linux Administration

  • System Configuration / Kernel overview 
  • System Maintenance / Disk and file admin
  • Using utilities for process control, locating files & automating maintenance tasks
  • System Startup / Boot Process – LILO & GRUB Configuration
  • Managing the Linux file system
  • Customization of setup files
  • Run Levels
  • Network Services / Configuration
  • User Management Monitoring, accessing & restricting root system access
  • Administration Tools
  • Process Control
  • Client side components of NFS, Samba, NTP, NIS
  • Server side components such as DHCP, Samba, NIS, LDAP, inet, telnet, ftp, DNS, etc.

Prerequisites:

  • Prior UNIX/Linux experience or training

Comments

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User: mikenaya

Instructor comments: As usual, Dave was excellent and the content was very relevant to our line of work.

Facilities comments: The hotel facilities met our basic needs but it was awkward having a bathroom so close. I can't wait for the new facility to open.

User: fquinene

Instructor comments: Instructor was super knowledgeable and helped me tie in a lot of information from other OS and processes.

Facilities comments: Facility was fine

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Palo Alto Networks Firewall Training Course Lab

Working with the TechNow lab for the PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack course has been nothing less than a techie's idea of fun.  When students come in we are immediatly configuring the Cisco 3750 switches for access ports, VLANS, and trunks.  We then cable the switch to the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.  Each student gets their own Palo Alto Firewall Pod of hardware and software.  What we find as fun is the VLAN environment, with an array of virtual machines hosted on an ESXi server that can really exercise the abilities of the Palo Alto Firewall.  The DMZ VLAN hosts virtual machines that support enterprise services and also potentialy vulnerable web services.  The Trust VLAN has Windows and Linux clients.  The UnTrust VLAN has Web services and a VM of Kali. The hardware Firewall is additionally connected to a Management VLAN.  All those VLANs are trunked into an ESXi server where the student also has a VM-Series Palo Alto Networks Firewall for High Availability.  

After configuring all the trunking, VLANs, and network interfaces we learn about the firewall and configure it for the lab environment.  Using Metasploitable and Kali/Metasploit nefarious penetration attempts are executed.  Using packet captures, custom APP-ID's  and custom signatures are generated.  Custom logging and reporting are created to similate and enterprise and assist the desired Incident Response.  It is always fun in a training environment to learn all about the controls available in a product, even though specific controls may not be used in the operational environment.  In the end we have a good understanding of the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.

CT-425: CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+)

Course Overview:

This course will cover topics to ensure that students have the technical knowledge and skills required to conceptualize, design, and engineer secure solutions across complex enterprise environments.  Students will be able to apply critical thinking and judgement across a broad spectrum of security disciplines to propose and implement solutions that map to enterprise drivers.  This course will prepare students for the objectives covered in the CompTIA CASP+ certification exam (CAS-004).

Attendees to CT-425: CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+) will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

Date/Time Event
03/10/2025 - 03/14/2025
09:00 -17:00 		CT-425: CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+)
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
06/09/2025 - 06/13/2025
09:00 -17:00 		CT-425: CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+)
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
09/15/2025 - 09/19/2025
09:00 -17:00 		CT-425: CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+)
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX
12/08/2025 - 12/12/2025
09:00 -17:00 		CT-425: CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+)
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX

Duration: 5 days

Course Objectives:

  • Support IT governance in the enterprise with an emphasis on managing risk
  • Leverage collaboration tools and technology to support enterprise security
  • Use research and analysis to secure the enterprise
  • Integrate advanced authentication and authorization techniques
  • Implement cryptographic techniques
  • Implement security controls for hosts
  • Implement security controls for mobile devices
  • Implement network security
  • Implement security in the systems and software development lifecycle
  • Integrate hosts, storage, networks, applications, virtual environments, and cloud technologies in a secure enterprise architecture
  • Conduct security assessments
  • Respond to and recover from security incidents

Prerequisites:

Completion of the following or equivalent knowledge:

CompTIA Certification: A+ Essentials

CompTIA Certification: Security+

Comments

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User: clbrack

Instructor comments: I expect to pass, another great class from technow!

User: christopher0470

Instructor comments: Alan takes the time to cover the material so that you understand the concepts and applications of the information presented.

Facilities comments: I like the location. It was quiet and very conducive to learning.

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TN-963: Windows Security Automation with PowerShell

Course Overview:

PowerShell is made for Security Operations (SecOps) automation on Windows. SecOps requires automation in order to scale out security changes and monitoring beyond a handful of hosts. For example, when a vulnerability must be remediated but there is no patch for it yet, automation is needed to quickly and consistently enact the changes necessary. PowerShell “remoting” is encrypted remote command execution of PowerShell scripts in a way that can scale to thousands of endpoints and servers.

Imagine being able to hunt for indicators of compromise across thousands of machines with just a few lines of PowerShell code. Or imagine having the local Administrator account password reset every night on thousands of endpoints in a secure way, and being able to retrieve that password securely too.

We will show you to do these tasks and more. Transcription logging for forensics, strong encryption code signing, application whitelisting of scripts, IPSec port control, and Just Enough Admin (JEA).

As more and more of our systems are moved up to the cloud, PowerShell will become even more important. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Hyper-V and VMware already support PowerShell administration for many tasks.

Attendees to TN-963: Windows Security Automation with PowerShell will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 3 days

Course Objectives:

Day One
PowerShell Overview and Tips

    • Getting started running commands
    • Using and updating the built-in help
    • Execution policies
    • Fun tricks with the ISE graphical editor
    • Piping .NET and COM objects, not text
    • Using properties and methods of objects
    • Helping Linux admins feel more at home
    • Aliases, cmdlets, functions, modules, etc.
    • Customizing your profile script

What Can We Do With PowerShell

    • PowerShell remote command execution
    • Fan-out remoting and security
    • File copy via PowerShell remoting
    • Capturing the output of commands
    • Parsing text files and logs with regex patterns
    • Searching remote event logs faster with XPath
    • Mounting the registry as a drive
    • Exporting data to CSV, HTML and JSON files
    • Parsing and mining nmap port scanner XML output
    • Running scripts as scheduled jobs
    • Pushing out scripts through Group Policy
    • Importing modules and dot-sourcing functions
    • http://www.PowerShellGallery.com

Write your own scripts

    • Writing your own functions
    • Passing arguments into your scripts
    • Function parameters and returning output
    • Flow control: if-then, do-while, foreach, switch
    • The .NET Framework class library: a playground
    • How to pipe data in/out of your scripts

Day Two
Continuous Secure Configuration Enforcement

    • How to use Group Policy and PowerShell together
    • Automate with INF security templates
    • How to customize INF templates
    • Microsoft Security Compliance Manager (SCM)
    • SECEDIT.EXE scripting
    • Building an in-house security repository for SecOps/DevOps
    • NSA’s Secure Host Baseline GPOs

Group Policy Precision Targeting

    • Managing Group Policy Objects (GPOs) with PowerShell
    • LSDOU, Block Inheritance, Enforced GPOs
    • Group Policy permissions for targeting changes
    • ADMX templates for mass registry editing
    • Deploying PowerShell startup and logon scripts
    • WMI item-level targeting of GPO preferences
    • GPO scheduled tasks to run PowerShell scripts
    • Remote command execution via GPO (not remoting)
    • Empowering the Hunt Team to fight back!

Server Hardening for SecOps/DevOps

    • Server Manager scripting with PowerShell
    • Adding and removing roles and feature
    • Remotely inventory roles, features, and apps
    • Why Server Nano or Server Core
    • Running PowerShell automatically after service failure
    • Service account identities, passwords, and risks
    • Tools to reset service account passwords securely

Day Three
PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)

    • DSC is Configuration Management built in for free
    • Using DSC for continuous reinforcement of settings
    • Writing your own DSC configuration scripts
    • Free DSC resource modules: www.PowerShellGallery.com
    • How to push DSC configurations to many targets
    • DSC background job processing in push mode
    • Examples: sync files, install roles, manage groups
    • Auditing a remote target against a DSC MOF template
    • “ApplyAndAutoCorrect” mode for continuous enforcement

PowerShell Just Enough Admin (JEA)

    • JEA is Windows sudo, like on Linux
    • JEA is Windows setuid root, like on Linux
    • Restricting commands and arguments
    • Verbose transcription logging
    • How to set up and configure JEA
    • Privilege Access Workstations (PAWs)

PowerShell and WMI

    • Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service
    • What is WMI and why do hackers abuse it so much?
    • Using PowerShell to query WMI CIM classes
    • WMI authentication and traffic encryption
    • Inventory operating system versions and installed software
    • WMI remote command execution versus PowerShell remoting
    • PowerShell security best practices
    • PowerShell transcription logging to catch hackers

Prerequisites:

  • GSEC or equivalent experience
  • UNIX, Windows, Networking, and Security Experience
  • This is a hands-on skill course requiring comfort with command line interaction and network communications

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