windows 2003, 2008, R2 how tos
Put simply, a Permanent Denial of Service (aka PDoS) attack is a hack that intentionally causes physical damage to a device. WHY WOULD SOMEONE PDoS? DoS stands for “Denial of Service” and usually that means an attacker wants to temporarily block access to your system so they can extract money from you. PDoS attacks are by definition permanent so why would someone do that do you? 1 – Governments & Corporate Competitors Governments and…
Since the last Windows 10 upgrade one of our staff noticed that Windows File Explorer did not show their profile path (We are always on beta’s which change every few weeks to there is little point to explaining the build details). Specifically, the missing user is “Calgary” and so the profile is stored in C:\USERS\CALGA but as you can see in the screen shot below, that user name does not appear. If I manually enter…
We recently tried to connect to the administrative shares (i.e. C$, E$, admin$, …) on a PC that was not part of a Domain using a Microsoft Account that was setup on that remote PC. We were frustrated to find it errored out with “You might not have permission to use this network resource” After a few hours of poking around we found the root cause was in User Access Control (UAC). What is User…
We recently licensed a copy of Windows Server 2016 from a website named Digital Software Planet. There instructions were to download and install a 180 day evaluation copy of Server 2016 from the Microsoft Evaluation center. They also provided a standard product license key but when we entered it we were unhappy to see it respond with THIS EDITION CANNOT BE UPGRADED The solution was to remove the evaluation CAB and activate via command line and…
We recently ran into a simple Java Security error that through off our techs. The error stated JAVA APPLICATION BLOCKED: APPLICATION BLOCKED BY JAVA SECURITY and our techs thought this had to do with the Java’s browser integration. They spent time working though Chrome, Edge and IE11 security items but in fact the error had a simple fix inside Java itself. The solution is to open the CONFIGURE JAVA applet, click the SECURITY TAB and…
I was amalgamating all of my old backups oneto a single USB drive when I stumbled on a DVD from 2006 that had a large file named “Web1-Primary_BU_Mar12_06.bkf” . After a few minutes of thinking I remembered that .BKF stands for BacKup File and remembered that “Windows Backup” had been deprecated and removed from Windows in the Vista (2007-ish) time frame. So that lead to the question of how to restore this old .BKF file…
You can’t uninstall / reinstall DNS from a Domain Controller so if your DNS server has insurmountable problems, make sure that you have a second DC with a working DNS then dcpromo (demote) the problematic DC, make sure DNS has been removed, then repromote that server to be a DC. Beyond that the next thing to do is restart the DNS Service which you can do through the DNS MMC console or through SERVICES.MMC .…
We are often asked about how to revive older servers when all you have is the physical server. How can you wipe out server and install a fresh copy of Windows Server 2012 when you don’t even have a copy of Server 2012 and you are new to working on physical hardware? In this video we explain and demonstrate how to: source a legal copy of Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019 convert…
In most cases servers from Dell, HP/Lenovo, and other big OEMs ship with the Windows operating system preinstalled and often they come with a “media pack” to allow reinstallation. The problem is that you can easily misplace that media pack (DVD or USB stick) between the time the server is new and when you have a hardware failure or want to wipe it out to sell it. If you Google search for Windows Server ISO…
A disk “partition” is just a logical slice of a hard drive. Logical means that you still only have a single drive but it is virtually cut into pieces so that if one partition has a problem, the whole disk will not fail. Let’s look at each of the different partitions you are likely to see on a hard drive running Windows 10 or Windows Server: 1- What is the RECOVERY Partition? The Recovery Partition…
If you are a system administrator or even a desktop support person, finding out information on a remote users computer is something you need to know how to do. Fortunately, Microsoft has made quite a number of commands easy to use. Here are some of the remote commands we use frequently. Just right click on the START button and select POWERSHELL as an Administrator that has permission to the remote computer and try these short…
WHAT IS KERBEROS AUTHENTICATION IN WINDOWS? Microsoft Windows Active Directory has a few fundamental core components that everything else is built upon. One of those is the main Kerberos key. The KRBTGT (Kerberos Ticket Generating Ticket Account) user account (take a look in ADUC > USERS… it is there), is used to encrypt and digitally sign all Kerberos tickets… which is ALL of the users and ALL of the devices. “…Kerberos is an authentication protocol…
WHAT IS DEFENDER APPLICATION GUARD: Application Guard is a fantastic option to run programs in a very secure space that is separated from the host operating system, thereby eliminating many potential hacks. For instance if you ran the WannaCry cryptolocker program from a website running with Application Guard, it would fail to encrypt your hard drive. HISTORY: Microsoft introduced Windows Defender Application Guard (WDAG) in September 2016 and renamed it Microsoft Defender Application Guard (MDAG)…
Microsoft Windows Defender Application Guard was developed because so many tools were “sandboxing” that hackers were spending more and more time going under the security by attacking the operating system Kernel. Application Guard operates as JUST less than a full virtual machine in something called a HyperV Container. These containers do NOT require Hyper-V to be installed but do require virtualization to be enabled in your computers BIOS. The slides below explain much of the…
If you are connecting to a computer to a PC configured with the language set to ENGLISH (UNITED KINGDOM), but you have ENGLISH (UNITED STATES) keyboard you will have some problems typing typical admin commands incluing the backslash. Fortunately there are four easy ways to generate a \ with a US keyboard on a UK language PC: Hold down the ALT key to the RIGHT of the spacebar and press the backslash key (i.e right…
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