Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 & 2022 How To’s
This is an argument I am so very tired of having so I decided to prove it. In about 1998, I recall reading a paper co-written with United States Department of Defense and Microsoft, which explained why adding a single character length to a password was far superior to adding Read more…
I was working with a client earlier this week who had brought in a security company to tighten up their infrastructure because they were a victim of a major hack just before we were brought in. That security company did a number of things to user accounts we found… odd, Read more…
We often take on new clients who do not have Windows update configured with a group policy and while it’s quite simple to set up it’s always nice to have some instructions and screenshots so here they are: 1 – Configure Windows Update to Download but Not Install 2. Install Read more…
As Windows Server and desktop administrators on thousands of machines we regularly see computers that have their C:\ drive filled with junk, and we have many articles on how to fix that: However one of the fastest easiest ways is simply to delete everyone’s Recycle Bins. Can Recycle Bins Be Read more…
If you look at the properties of an Azure File Share you will see the FILE SYSTEM is showing as MAFS. Microsoft uses “Azure Files” for Azure File Shares. Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol Read more…
We had a client who wanted us to audit their dozen servers for the status of their certificates. We decided to export all of the core certificate information into a simple .CSV which lets us modify and make it pretty in Excel. Note that we EXCLUDED all certificates that are Read more…
We are always being asked to expand disk and add new disk to VM’s on Azure and there is some confusion around the process. Expanding a disk on an Azure virtual machine (WM) is easy: Here are the two catches: Adding a New Drive to An Azure VM Adding new Read more…
If you’ve ever looked at Task Manager on a Windows computer you will notice on the PERFORMANCE tab under CPU in the bottom right hand corner something labeled L1 cache, L2 cache and, L3 cache: To answer the question what is the difference between L1, L2, and L3 cache we Read more…
You may notice when running SConfig to make changes to Windows update on Windows Server 2022 and Windows Server 2025 that you are unable to make changes. You may see the error: Failed to configure update settings. Registry access is not allowed. This is because SConfig is not being run Read more…
Installs and upgrades usually require more space than the install will need when it is done, and that can be a problem. We had a client that needed to upgrade a program installed on their servers C:\ and while the disk had enough free space to run the program, it Read more…
We had a client who wanted to know how much space each user profile was consuming on their EdgeSoft folder. We determined the path was C:\Users\{UserName}\AppData\Local\ES and then ran this script to do the calculations: If you want to find the amount of data used for a different folder, just Read more…
One of our clients had a Java uninstall go “badly” and now the install is broken. Java is a significant security risk so the client asked us to manually remove it. We tried: but all failed, so we had to go very manual. How To Uninstall Java Manually 1 – Read more…
We had a client who wanted to clean out a Java uninstall that had gone badly. Java was still showing in APPS AND FEATURES (aka PROGRAMS AND FEATURES) but it had been uninstalled already. We knew that the uninstall registry path was HKLM > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > Read more…
Today we had a client asking if their LogicMonitor software uses Java and if they can uninstall Java from their LogicMonitor collectors. The answers are, yes LogicMonitor uses Java but it is a fully embedded version that does not appear in APPS AND FEATURES. Any version that appears in APPS Read more…
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…