I’m excited to announce that I’ll be attending the upcoming Live! 360 Event, November 15-20, 2026, at Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando, Florida. I’ll be in attendance all week and will be delivering a few talks at the event this year.
Sessions
I’ll be presenting two sessions at this year’s event. They are:
TMH06 – Moving to Zero Trust: Entra Private Access for Always On VPN Administrators. This is a popular session demonstrating how to migrate from Always On VPN (or any other VPN solution) to Entra Private Access with Zero Trust enforcement. I’ll describe how to get “from here to there,” moving from fully open VPN access to strict zero trust access without disruption.
Join Me!
If you are planning to attend the event, please join my sessions! I will be at the conference center all week, so don’t hesitate to reach out and contact me while you are there. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone soon!
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Arizona Systems Management User Group (AZSMUG) at their next user group meeting on Friday, March 7, at 9:00 AM MST. I am presenting on the topic of Certificate Deployment Strategies with Microsoft Intune.
Intune and Certificates
My session at AZSMUG will provide an overview of issuing and managing certificates with Microsoft Intune. We’ll begin by examining common scenarios for certificate authentication and explore various delivery methods, including PKCS and SCEP. Additionally, we’ll discuss supporting technologies such as the Network Device Enrollment Service (NDES) and review deployment strategies and high availability options for the Intune Certificate Connector. The session will also cover Cloud PKI for Intune, integration with on-premises Active Directory, and best practices for securing certificate lifecycles and key management in enterprise environments.
Register Now
If you are in the Phoenix area and would like to attend the user group meeting on Friday, March 7, you will find the registration link here. Hope to see you there!
The Network Policy Server (NPS) event log is incredibly valuable for administrators when troubleshooting Always On VPN user tunnel connectivity issues. Administrators can find these pertinent events by opening the Event Viewer on the NPS server (eventvwr.msc) and navigating to Custom Views > Server Roles > Network Policy and Access Services.
Event Logs
When configured correctly, event logs will record the disposition of all authentication requests, allowed or denied. The two most common recorded events are event IDs 6272 (access granted) and 6273 (access denied).
NPS Event ID 6272 – Access granted.
NPS Event ID 6273 – Access denied.
Auditing
In some cases, administrators may find none of these events recorded even though user authentication is working correctly. Here, the only events recorded are NPS informational events indicating which domain controller the NPS server is using to perform authentication.
The lack of 6272 and 6273 events in the event log indicates that auditing for NPS events is not enabled. Open an elevated PowerShell window and run the following command to view the current auditing setting for NPS events.
Alternatively, consider using Active Directory group policy to enforce the NPS server auditing settings. Open the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and create a new GPO. Next, navigate to Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Advanced Audit Policy Configuration > Audit Policies > Logon/Logoff > Audit Network Policy Server and select the option to audit both success and failure attempts.
Once complete, link this GPO to the OU where the NPS servers reside.
Missing Events
If auditing is enabled and there are no recorded 6272 or 6273 events, the NPS server did not receive any authentication requests from the VPN server. Review the event logs on any other NPS servers if there is more than one configured. In addition, this may indicate that network communication between the VPN and NPS server is blocked. Ensure network connectivity and name resolution are working as expected.
Troubleshooting Guides
Are you interested in learning more about Always On VPN troubleshooting? My Always On VPN book contains an entire chapter dedicated to troubleshooting. Also, my Always On VPN video training course on Pluralsight includes a module on troubleshooting. The video training course is available to Pluralsight subscribers only. If you don’t have a Pluralsight subscription, you can sign up for a free trial here.
