I had some trouble finding some good examples of syntax and full explanation for creating VHD files (attaching new hard drives) from the Azure Powershell command line and attaching them to existing VMs. Here is my quick and dirty method of doing just that…
Ran into a fun issue today… I had a pair of Server 2012 R2 servers in a remote office that refused to sync the proper time for their clocks. No matter what I did they were always off by five minutes. One of them was a domain controller for the office. In the process of […]
One of my glorious privileges in IT is managing and enforcing security policy for the company I work for. Being a windows shop, one of the primary tools I use to that end is Group Policy. For those of you not familiar with Group Policy, it is Microsoft’s gift (and sometimes curse) to admins such […]
In a post Heartbleed world, implementation of SSL is being scrutinized like never before (at least in my short years of experience in information security). Even though Microsoft/IIS implementations were hardly, if at all, affected by Heartbleed, they do often suffer from other common SSL vulnerabilities. This is particularly true of Microsoft Server 2003 R2 […]
Recently I had to transfer the FSMO roles in my Active Directory Domain to a new domain controller. They aren’t a particularly exciting topic or even really all that common in the grand scheme of things. However, if you do Microsoft Active Directory administration, FSMO roles are something you should at least be aware of […]
A couple of days ago I posted full instructions for integrating an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server into your Microsoft Active Directory Windows Domain. This is a short follow-up to that post which can be found here: http://www.kiloroot.com/add-ubuntu-14-04-lts-server-to-a-windows-active-directory-domain-fullest-integration/ To make my life easier I wrote three shell scripts that can be run to automate the majority […]
Update 3/31/2016 – PBIS doesn’t work well as of late and this method has been superceded by this article here: http://www.kiloroot.com/add-ubuntu-14-04-server-or-desktop-to-microsoft-active-directory-domain-login-to-unity-with-domain-credentials/ Update 5/18/2014 – I created scripts to automate 90% of this process. I still recommend you read this post before just jumping in and using the scripts so that you know what exactly it […]
I have a single DC test environment at home and I am running on old hardware. One machine’s clock had gained 3 hours. That machine happened to be the domain controller. I am running Server 2012 R2 on all machines so i used powershell to run the following commands: Check how far off the system […]
I had to reconfig my dysfunct home office network today but now everything is setup and talking correctly. I received a 16 port unmanaged switch and 3 USB lan adapters today and all is working correctly with my 3 Server 2012 R2 boxes. The cluster can move forward as soon as I have some more […]
So part of my “poor-man’s hyper-v cluster” experiment in my home office here has led me to start looking into storage options for virtual platforms. Hyper-V is apparently quite flexible, however fail-over clustering limits your options. So for those of you who are just joining us I am doing research on clustered Hyper-V for work. […]
I have a stack of old laptops sitting here from work (I occasionally get the old ones back when they are retired). It occurred to me that laptops would make a very good “home server stack” environment. Here is my reasoning…
Today I am working on setting up a BackupPC server to take remote internal centralized backups of some of our other servers on the cheap. I already had BackupPC installed and the basics configured but I needed to add a new drive to the system (for additional backup data storage) and I also needed to […]
Here is the scenario – You are an IT Admin for a business that is large enough or handles data of a particular type such that you have to worry about security more than the average Joe. Furthermore, you get audited from time to time. However, people want an IM (Instant Messenger) solution and… they […]
I have been seeing some really odd issues lately on a couple of our Hyper-V hosts. I initially had chocked the issues up to slow storage access speeds caused by a possibly defunct storage controller on one particular server. However, recently the issues got worse. I was getting random errors that were preventing me from […]
This is a very handy tool that every Windows Admin should have in their repertoire: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/html/pbPage.Help_Win7_usbdvd_dwnTool#installation Direct Tool Download Link This little software program allows you to take any of the operating system ISO files mentioned above and convert them into a bootable flash drive from which you can install windows. Handy on any workstation/server/laptop […]