I won’t go into great detail here but in short, if VSSAdmin is not letting you delete shadow copies and is throwing this message: Error: Snapshots were found, but they were outside of your allowed context. Try removing them with the backup application which created them. There is another (less safe…) program called DiskShadow which […]
After working with RDS (Remote Desktop Services, previously known as “Terminal Services”, also referred to “The biggest pain in the rear and the only way to get more than two remote desktop sessions on a server because Microsoft either hates admins, hates this product, or both”) I have come to the conclusion that Microsoft really […]
I regularly use the Microsoft Windows sysprep tool to create template Windows Server 2012 R2 systems for wider deploy using cloning. Sysprep is used to modify a pre-configured Windows system and create an image or “template” so that you can create unique copies of it for faster system deployment. Failure to use syprep before cloning […]
I will keep this short and sweet. We have servers in our environment that have multiple IP addresses assigned to a single NIC. That’s normally just fine. However on occasion I will have very strange issues occur where essentially all networking appears to be working and yet web browsing won’t work. I can ping my […]
I have been fiddling about with setting up a SQL Server 2012 Failover cluster using an Equallogic SAN. After a whole lot of digging about I found two different posts on two different sites which got me about 90% of the way there. However there were some key “gotcha’s” and other information that was missing […]
One of most difficult things to find (imho) is information about API and Service URL’s for just about any and all applications. Microsoft is better than some (Dell, I am looking at you…) but it can still require some metaphorical google search back flips to get to the right information. That said… I wanted to […]
The Event Viewer is a very useful tool however, like any log management solution, the biggest hurdle can be filtering out the noise and returning only the meaningful log data that you care about. This is a follow-up on a previous article which can be viewed here: Finding Human Logins in the Windows Event Viewer […]
This is a quick snippet for all of you working with RDS in Server 2012+… and bemoaning the fact that Microsoft took something relatively simple and made it horribly convoluted… In Powershell you can manually set a Session Host Server to use a specific licensing server and mode. To do so you run the following […]
For this tutorial I will be walking through how to use a tool called Realmd to connect an Ubuntu Server or Ubuntu Desktop system to a Windows Active Directory Domain. In the past I wrote an article talking about how to use Powerbroker Identity Services to do the same thing, but the scope of the […]
I think I have put together a pretty good solution for load balancing websites across multiple instances of IIS 8.5. I am sure my ideas aren’t novel but I am documenting them here for future reference. This isn’t meant to be a full walkthrough but rather it is me keeping notes for personal use and […]
One of the items I had to do a bit of digging to find was the location of the startup folder for all users. If you aren’t familiar with the “startup” folder on your system I will explain it briefly. The startup folder is a place you can put executable files (.exe), batch files (.bat), […]
I recently setup a new secondary windows domain. All of the users are logging in remotely via a VPN connection and their workstations belong to a different, separate domain… I quickly found myself having to regularly administer accounts… What I needed was a password self-service tool so users could take care of simple things like […]
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 […]
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. […]