Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 & 2022 How To’s
If you work in the IT field and have anything to do with hardware or security, you need to have an awareness of CPU microcode. What is CPU Microcode? You can think of microcode as firmware for your CPU, and like other firmware it is updatable which means it is Read more…
If you see the following error in your event logs there are two easy fixes: Eventsource: Windows System Event Log Windows Event ID: 1028 Message: The DHCP service failed to initialize the audit log. The following error occurred: Access is denied. You can either disable DHCP logging or give the Read more…
Last week we have a client who wanted to audit their file shares. They had set up their permissions NTFS permissions properly by putting USERS into GROUPS and then assigning those groups to RESOURCES (i.e. the shares). That meant all we had to do was export a list of all Read more…
We recently produced a report of how many unused / free IP addresses were available is each of our customers DHCP scopes. (HERE is the simple script to create that list). As you can see in the screenshot below, we found a negative number free IP’s in one of the Read more…
We recently had a client who wanted to audit their many DHCP subnets. To that end they wanted a list of subnets, and how many IP’s each still had remaining. This was tricky because they had many DHCP IP Reservations which were not always in use. We created the script Read more…
If you are seeing the following error in your Windows System Event log, we likely have the fix: Source: Application Management Group PolicyEvent ID: 103Level: ErrorUser: SYSTEMDescription: The removal of the assignment of application {application name} from policy policy name failed. The error was : %%2 What it is telling you is that GPO Read more…
One of our clients thought that only domain controllers and windows clients like Windows 11 and Win10 could use the Active Directory management tools, like AD USERS AND COMPUTERS. However, it is easy to install ADUC (and other RSAT tools) on a member server: This does not require a reboot Read more…
Below is a very simple PowerShell command to export a list of IP address reservations in a DHCP server
If you see an EXPORT – COMPLETED WITH ERRORS message in your Azure Synchronization Service Manager, double click on it and see if tells you: This error indicates that a deleted object was recovered from the recycle bin in Azure ADbefore Azure AD Connect was able to confirm its deletion. Read more…
If you’ve ever needed to make space on a hard drive you should have looked at Advanced System Settings > User Profiles to see if they’re any accounts listed as unknown for people that you know are gone and no longer need their profiles. And if you have been into Read more…
It’s very common to want to allow a small group of people or even a help desk possibly from a third party company manage service provider to manage user accounts in Active Directory. As you can see in the screenshot below it’s not exactly rocket science but there is a Read more…
About a week ago we brought on a new client and immediately noticed, as part of our pre-onboarding due diligence, that they had hundreds of old desktops laptops and servers still in their Active Directory. To help clean up their AD and reduce their attack surface, we provided them with Read more…
We have many complex ways to clean up the WSUS database to make the WSUS MMC stop crashing and to free up space on the disk holding the database. However, there are three very simple methods that our own technicians forget about. Today we had a client with a 360GB Read more…
We recently had one of our clients need to retire one of the RDS servers from their farm and wanted to know to correct process for decommissioning. While it is not difficult, we have had clients just power down an RDS server and delete it. This is bad. PHASE 1 Read more…
If you’ve ever taken a snapshot in Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, or VMware, you will probably notice that the differencing disk it creates grows in size much faster than a normal disk would. One of our clients was struggling to understand why that could be the case so we provided them Read more…
If you are trying to clean up your hard drive storage you may notice the C:\$Windows.~WS folder and wonder what is in it and if it can be deleted. What is C:\$Windows.~WS The C:\$Windows.~WS folder is a hidden directory created by Windows during the upgrade process to a new version Read more…