Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019 & 2022 How To’s
After some playing around, Googling and talking to Microsoft we verified that there is not a built-in feature to add a description or note directly to an Azure VM. However, you can easily use Azure Tags to add metadata to your Azure resources, including VMs: Note that each resource in Read more…
When you promote a Windows Server to be a Domain Controller, Active Directory tools get installed automatically including the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). Group Policy Management Console does not always get installed on member servers even if RSAT tools (think, Active Directory Users and Computers) are installed. Put simply, Read more…
This article answers the questions, ‘who has access to that printer and what permissions do they have?’ We recently had a large multinational company go through a security audit in which a list of Each user or group listed in the permissions of each printer was required. After struggling for Read more…
As you likely already know, most SSL certificates show only the “friendly name” of the issuing Certificate Authority and not the host name. 1 – The Certificates ISSUED BY Field Often the ISSUED BY field will give you a clue to the hostname of your CA If that CA name Read more…
“Authenticated Users” is a special built-in group in Active Directory. It doesn’t exist like a typical group as shown in the Group Scope table below. This group includes all users who have a password in the Active Directory domain or in a trusted domain. To be clear, Authenticated Users contains Read more…
If you’re an it pro and you have either worked on an Active Directory for a long time or taken someone else’s over you will know that there are security groups that are just not used anymore but you’re afraid to delete them because they might be. You can use Read more…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will be familiar with generative AI and if you’re a tech or a CTO, you should already know that there are a number of privacy issues with generative AI. We have a simple article explaining how to disable Adobe Acrobat AI features Read more…
We just published a short article explaining why it might be a good idea to disable Generative AI functions in some software. Most notably, Adobe’s AI ingests into its learning model whatever you ask of it. That means if you ask it a question about something confidential that confidential information Read more…
We recently had a server with Event 8: The flush and hold writes operation on volume \?\Volume{9134713c-0000-0000-0000-100000000000} timed out while waiting for a release writes command. The error message appear repeatedly but intermittently over the last few months. We found the error related to Volume Shadow Copies (Event ID 5 Read more…
Service Principal Names (SPN) are user accounts in Active Directory that are usually created automatically by programs you are installing to allow them to have additional rights beyond what most programs do. You can see the Service Principal Names accounts in Active Directory Users and Computers but you can not Read more…
It can get very complex to figure out just who has access to a particular group or folder when the security groups become nested. Having one security group with other security groups inside as members and then each of those groups possibly having even more groups inside them, gets messy Read more…
You may have noticed that when you look at a certificate, that the Certificate Authority shown in the ISSUED BY field is just text and does not point you to the host name of the computer that is acting as your CA. This can be frustrating if you’re trying to Read more…
UPDATED: March 7 2024 If you are using Backup Exec you are aware that there is a trust relationship that is required between the backup exec and any clients computers that it is backing up. That trust is established through certificates which are NOT managed by Windows Certificate Manager (certlm.mmc). Read more…
If you have tried to uninstall an old version of Semantic Endoint Protection (SEP) and found that it just won’t die there are two ready solutions: 1: Free Symantec Endpoint Protection Removal Tool Symantec, well now Broadcom, has made available a free utility to uninstall old versions and damaged versions Read more…
If you are an administrator of Windows computers there will be a time when you need to shut down and or reboot a computer from another computer. Our case we just had a server that wouldn’t let us log in even after we remotely restarted services and remotely killed other Read more…
If you want to backup an on-prem server to Azure, the easiest way to do it is with Microsoft Azure Backup Server (aka MABS). To do this your server needs free space of about 8% (Microsoft says 5%-10%) of the space you are backing up. So if you want to Read more…