Test Layout

Someone at Microsoft must have decided it was time to clean up the support documentation. You'll now find that if you try to use a link referring to older Windows Server 2003 documentation or support docs, you instead get prompted to download a PDF. At first I didn't think much about this as I didn't really need the documentation. Today I wanted to confirm some processes in a forest recovery (a low likelihood issue, but I'm doing up some documentation). Ok, I'll download this and find the content I want. It turns out that this PDF is 150MB and 28000 pages. I'm sure it's complete, but not very convenient. If anyone else is looking for the forest recovery info, it's on page 3078. I should also point out that this content is relevant all the way up to Windows Server 2012 R2 (and I assume Windows Server 2016 also). MS has no other official forest recovery info that I've run across. And just for fun, here's a link to the Windows 2003/2003 R2 retired c

My daughter needs to practice her multiplication tables. So, I came up with a little script that can help. You can use the script on any Windows computer. Copy the code below into a text file and then name that file something like multiply.ps1 . The file needs to end in .ps1 for Windows to recognize it as PowerShell. You may also need to allow PowerShell scripts on your computer. Open a PowerShell prompt and run Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned . If you have the file saved on your desktop, right-click it and select Run with Windows PowerShell Clear-Host $questions = Read-Host "How many questions?" For($i=1;$i -le $questions;$i++) { $first = Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 10 $second = Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum 10 $answer = $first * $second Do { Clear-Host Write-Host "$first x $second = ??" $response = Read-Host "Enter your answer" If ($response -eq $answer) { Write-Host

I was doing some disaster recovery testing for Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers today with Veritas NetBackup. I’m running through and documenting some scenarios in a test environment. Better to document the steps before you need them! Doing a non-authoritative and an authoritative restore went well by restoring the system state. Next up on my list was a full server restore. The documentation for a full server restore was (to be kind) a bit fuzzy. The best of their articles I could find was this one: https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH56473 At a high level, the instructions are: Install and OS with the NetBackup client software. Restore the drives (and don’t reboot yet) Restore the system state Reboot My problem was that after the reboot I got a blue screen. After stopping the blue screen long enough to see the error, I saw this: STOP: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start because of the following error: The specified procedure could not be found Error status: 0xc

Microsoft is aggressively encouraging Office 365 customers to use Office 365 groups instead of traditional distribution groups. In the Exchange admin center, when you select to create a distribution group, you get a popup to create an Office 365 group instead, as shown below. There is one difference between this popup and if you actually selected an Office 365 group. This window has an option to create a distribution list. You can see it in the screenshot above by the red arrow. I'm pointing out that option because I didn't see it at first and was only made aware of it by Microsoft. I should also note that another work around is to create a distribution list in the Office 365 admin center. That option is still available and is the same as creating a distribution group in Exchange admin center.

As a technology professional, I dread calling tech support sometimes. Most of the time when you contact tech support (for any software), you get a front line person that is not terribly knowledgeable or useful. That first level person has access to a knowledgebase that is similar to what you could find by searching online. When that person can't help, they pass you up to a higher level of support that can likely fix your issue. The other problem with most tech support is timeliness. You are often kept on hold for an extended period of time or are forced to contact support via email or web form and hope that they get back to you within a few hours. It's almost never quick. My experience with Office 365 support today was amazing. I had a question on Sunday morning at about 11am and had an answer within 10 minutes. Here is what it looked like.... I'm working on some labs and find that in the Exchange admin center, when I attempt to create a distribution group it actually promp

I haven't run into this yet, but it appears that in some cases, Hyper-V virtual machines running Exchange Server will hang when installing updates. Specifically this seems to occur when running updates for Hyper-V integration services. There are reports of KB3037623 specifically causing this issue. KB3037623 The fix is to: Disable the Exchange services Apply the update Reenable the Exchange services This blog posting provides detailed steps: http://blog.scng.si/exchange-server-vm-becomes-unresponsive-while-updating-hyper-v-integration-services/

I'm doing some onsite PowerShell training this week and realized that I mention lots of resources but haven't provided a list of them anywhere for easy access. So, this posting is my best summary of Windows PowerShell related learning content from Microsoft. There are also a bunch of my links to my blog articles that I use as examples in class. General Resources Microsoft makes a lot of content available online for free. Here is a high level list: Microsoft Virtual Academy - Free online courses https://mva.microsoft.com/ Technet Labs Online - Free online labs that include activities. However, the VMs are not restricted and you can use them for any testing you want to do. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/virtuallabs Microsoft Ignite - The session videos from Microsoft's yearly technical conference. https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos Channel 9 - Videos from Microsoft development teams and conferences. Search for whatever you're interested in. https://channel9.m

One of my clients has a tool from Microsoft that scans the AD infrastructure and generates a report of items that can fixed/improved. One of the items on a recent report was stale SIDs on GPOs that could affect GPO processing. However, the tools didn't give us the stales SIDs. Just said we had them. First, let's talk about what a stale SID is... All Windows security is based on a Security Identifier (SID) that is unique for each user or group. In the Access Control List (ACL) for an resource, it is the SID that is assigned permissions, not the name of a user or group. The Windows tools just translate that SID back to a user or group name for use to manage them easier. A stale SID occurs when a user or group has been assigned permissions to access a resource and the user or group is later deleted. There is no link back from the user or group to where the permissions have been assigned. So, Windows cannot go back and remove the SID from the ACL. The SID that's left behind wit