Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 & 2022 How To’s
A month ago we had a client that had a successful attack on their infrastructure and to protect themselves one of more than 100 changes included auditing a few folders. Specifically they wanted to have a listing stored somewhere every time someone accessed a particular folder. To enable folder auditing Read more…
We had a client with an odd partition configuration. As you can see in the screen shot to the right, the recovery partition appears after C: drive volume with data on it. The question is, it is safe to delete the Recovery Partition to all the C:\ to be easily Read more…
Time synchronization especially between Domain Controllers often comes into question with our smaller clients, who do not have it setup correctly. The simplified version of the configuration is that the domain controller which holds the PDC emulator FISMO (lets call is DC01) should be set to sync with some external, Read more…
If you are a Microsoft partner you will probably have become aware that in January the Microsoft Action Pack that has been around for the better part of two decades is going away. There are several options but for most small partners the replacement is called the Partner Launch Benefits Read more…
Last week we had a customer with a Proxmox hyper-converged cluster to run their virtual machines who had notable performance problems. If you are not familiar with Proxmox just think of it as a free version of VMware, or Hyper-V with SCCM VM Manager. The fundamental issue was that even Read more…
We recently detailed the top 100 Windows Services because our technicians frequently need to know where they came from, what the default user is, and what those services really do. However, the IaaSVmProvider service did not make that list and it has come up a few times in meetings, so Read more…
One of our clients recently noticed a setting in Windows Defender > Virus & Threat Protection > Dev Drive Protection and asked us what the heck that is. This is what we told them: What Is a Dev Drive? Microsoft introduced Dev Drives at the Microsoft Build conference in May Read more…
Manage service provider that we help out from time to time called us with a curiosity today. It turns out that they just signed up a new corporate customer and our moving them off of ESET antivirus in favor of Windows Defender. The problem is they can’t uninstall ESET because Read more…
We recently had a client with several Windows Server presenting this error message when admins were attempting to RDP to them: REMOTE DESKTOP CONNECTIONThe remote computer that you are trying to connect to requires Network LevelAuthentication (NLA), but your Windows domain controller cannot be contacted to performNLA. If you are Read more…
Last week we had a client who wanted to delete ALL disabled user accounts because they had been hacked and wanted to reduce their attack surface. The two problems we had with this is that there are accounts that are disabled but may be needed in the future, and there Read more…
We recently created a video on how to easily setup and operate MABS in which we explained the difference between Microsoft Data Protection Manager, Microsoft Azure Backup Service and the Microsoft Azure Backup Server (both confusingly accroymed MABS). Part of that video was created for a client who was having Read more…
On the weekend we had a customer who was trying to remove one of their Microsoft Office 365 activations (which we have instructions for here), but instead they deactivating their laptop completely: They user disabled their computer by: To undo this mistake and administrator needs to reenable the device by: Read more…
One of our tech’s working in another city had a client with an auditor’s penetration test report indicating their SNMP was accessible on the internet from three different servers. They wanted to know if that was a bad thing and if it is bad, how they can test for it Read more…
If you’ve ever worked in group policy, you know that the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) hasn’t changed very much since it was introduced in Windows 2000 way back in 1999. One critical feature that’s been missing since day one, is the ability to search through a Group Policies to Read more…
With the advent of virtual machines came the notion that because hard drives can be expanded in the future you should set them to be as small as they possibly can be at the start. As a result our technicians are constantly having to clean up C:\ to make space. Read more…
We had a client who needed to know exactly what was installed on all of their servers in an effort to prepare for an audit. This client is quite small and only had about a dozen servers so instead of writing a script that remotely logs into each server and Read more…