MPA Tools use Cryptlex for secure licensing.

To activate and verify a license or a trial, outbound communication is required between MPA Tools and Cryptlex servers.

If you have an outbound Firewall rule in place, you need to whitelist the Cryptlex API

Firewall whitelisting

Whitelist the IP addresses below.

• 52.223.22.71
• 35.71.188.31

Alternatively, you can also whitelist the Cryptlex Web API URL:

https://api.cryptlex.com:443

Proxy

MPA Tools automatically detects the proxy settings of the machine. In some cases, you may need to configure the proxy setting manually.

Following are some examples of valid proxy strings

http://127.0.0.1:8000/

http://user:pass@127.0.0.1:8000/

socks5://127.0.0.1:8000/

To configure Proxy settings, go to the MPA Tools Settings menu and add your proxy configurations as per example above.

With MPA Tools, you can remotely manage one or multiple domain computers. Below we listed everything you need to configure your environment.

1. Access

• Read access to Active Directory to read AD attributes of a computer object, such as OS, when a computer was created, etc. (in most cases, all users have read access to computer object attributes in AD,  and usually no specific access configurations are needed)
• Optional: Delegated permissions to computer objects in AD if you want to use MPA Tools to delete, move or update computer objects in AD
• Local Administrator permissions on a remote computer

2. Firewall

When you start managing computers in MPA Tools, the first action you take is to PING or DISPLAY computer(s).

• DISPLAY computer uses LDAP/Graph API query(if AAD settings are configured) to query device information such as Operating System, etc. For the LDAP queries to work, you want to ensure you have allowed LDAP ports for querying from a computer with MPA Tools installed.
• PING as DISPLAY option uses LDAP plus, but additionally, it sends Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo Request to a specified interface on the network and waits for a reply. For PING to work, you need to allow ICMP inbound traffic through Firewall on remote computers (This is optional if you are not planning to Ping computers)

When accessing the domain joined remote computer, the MPA Tools uses WMI to access computer information remotely.

For that, you need to open Inbound RPC port 135, and additionally, you may need to open a dynamic RPC port range (49152-65535)

Configure the above Firewall settings with GPO.

3. Main Configurations

MPA Tools has excellent flexibility regarding configurations and tuning the application to your liking.

1. “Load AD device stats on Main page” – Enable/Disable loading AD device stats. MPA Tools purely uses LDAP to collect the information. Data is loading on a background on a separate thread and does not prevent the user from taking any actions within the application.             

2. “Load AAD device stats on Main page” – Enable/Disable loading Azure AD device stats. Must have Tenant configurations in place for this option to be available. This workload, as the above AD device collection workload, runs in the background and uses MS Graph API to collect the data

3. “Load MECM device stats on Main page” – Enable/Disable loading MECM/SCCM device/SCCM client stats. Background workload that connects directly to the SMS Provider to get the data. For this configuration to work, all SCCM configurations, such as Site Server name, etc., must be in place.

4. “Always Display Computers, don’t Ping then” – Enabled by default, allows user to select whether to Ping computers by default or Display

4.1 “Automatically open Computer Properties with pinging or Displaying [number] or less Computer(s)” – By default, the setting is set to 1, meaning when Pingin or Displaying one computer Computer Properties tab is opened, data will start loading. Set to 0(Zero) if you do not want to open Computer Properties; you can always open Computer Properties later by double-clicking on a computer object. Setting the setting to 3, for example, will open Computer Properties on all three computers at the same time.

5. “Start with continuous ping if number of computers is less than or equals [number]” – By default, the setting is set to 1, meaning when you PING computers, if the amount of computers you are pinging is 1, then the ping will be continuous by default. For example, changing the setting value to 4 will PING 4 or fewer computers every time you PING 4 computers.

5.1 “Default Ping period [number] seconds” – How often to ping computer(s) if computers are being pinged continuously. The default value is 10 seconds

5.2 “Prefer IPv4” – When pinging remote computers, always prefer IPv4. The default setting is IPv4. If IPv4 is selected, IPv6 IP addresses will be ignored entirely (This does not apply to data collected from SCCM or Intune).

5.3 “Reverse DNS IP lookup” – When pinging a computer by computer name, the IP address is resolved from DNS; however, reverse IP lookup could preset different results and help surface DNS issues. This setting is enabled by default. Consider turning off this setting to improve performance when working simultaneously with more than thirty computers.

4. Computer Properties Configurations

MPA Tools Computer Properties relies on a “line-of-sight” connection between Computer where MPA Tools is installed and the remote computer(s) the administrator is planning to manage. In the majority of cases, Computer Properties will be displayed for Domain, Hybrid AD, or WORKGROUP joined computers. If a remote computer is, for example, Azure AD joined, Computers Properties will not be displayed; instead, Intune Computer Properties will be opened.

1. “Domain Name” – Detected on the first run of MPA Tools. You can change this setting to a different Domain name, but make sure that you run MPA Tools as a user that has all the necessary access to that domain.

2. “Timeout when connecting to remote computer [60] seconds” – When connecting to a remote computer, how long to wait until abandoning the connection. In some cases, with remote computers that have very high latency, consider increasing this setting.

3. “Data Collection Timeout [60] seconds” – How long to wait before interrupting data collection. This setting applies to the Computer Properties page data, such as the Last Restart time or Reboot pending. Increase if you have a longer time connecting to a remote device.

4. “Properties Refresh every [60] seconds” – How often to refresh data on the Computer Properties page. One thing to note is that some configurations, such as “Applied GPOs” or “Load Installed Apps” do not respect this setting and, once loaded, have to be refreshed manually. 

5. “Properties Refresh count [200] times” – How many times to refresh the Computer Properties page before pausing. For example, the Computer Properties page refreshes every minute and will take 200 minutes before the last refresh. After that, a single manual refresh will restart the count. This is done to prevent unnecessary data collection from a remote computer when the administrator “walked away.”

6. “Options when Property Page loads” – Allows a user to configure which components to load when the Computer Properties page is loaded. Once unselected, the property will not be visible on the Computer Property page.

Administering computers in Workgroup with MPA Tools is a very straightforward process.

A few simple steps are required to be configured manually on remote computers.

1. Common Workgroup name – make sure that all computers are in the workgroup with the same name (example: WORKGROUP)

2. Same local administrator account exists on all computers. For example, if you are running MPA Tools as a user called “Admin,” make sure that “Admin” exists on all remote computers and has local administrator rights (member of the Local Administrators group).

3. Make sure that the “Private network” firewall on All remote computers allows remote administration traffic as well as ICMP (Ping) traffic.

Note that you can configure remote administration by Local Policy or the registry.

After all, the steps are completed, you can start managing devices.

One quick way to understand what is on your network is to Ping devices on your subnet.

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