Group Policy To Throttle Network Speed via QoS
KB ID 0001217 Problem Why would you want to do this? Well what if you want to test slow link group policy processing, or you are testing BranchCache? Using Group policy you can ‘throttle’ traffic to and from a particular IP address. Below I will pick a domain client on 192.168.110.120, and throttle all traffic between that client, and the domain controller to be 100kbps. Solution As I sad above I’m throttling...
PowerShell – Updating Users Email Addresses In Active Directory
KB ID 0001216 Problem Note: I’m referring to the Email address value that is listed on the user object in Active Directory, this will not effect any Exchange Settings! A colleague asked me today if I had any PowerShell to update ALL the users in a clients AD, to match their UPN to their Email addresses. A quick internet search turned up loads of handy scripts to update the UPN to mach the email address, but not the way round he...
Remote Desktop Web – Session Timeouts (Altering)
KB ID 0001215 Problem Timeouts for the RDWeb portal are defined by the choice you made when you logged in, if you selected ‘private’ or ‘public’ on the PC options, this sets the timeout. The default is 240 mins for private, and 20 minutes for public connections. Solution To alter these values you need to make changes in the ‘Internet Information Services Management Console’ on the RDWeb server....
Hyper-V Ceate and Deploy Machine Templates (Without VMM)
KB ID 0001214 Problem Last week, myself and a few of my colleagues had to deploy a LOT of servers into Hyper-V. The client did not have System Center Virtual Machine Manager, so the process of creating and deploying a machine from a template is a little more convoluted Solution Here I’m deploying Windows Server 2012 Datacenter, but we repeated the process for Oracle Linux (Red Hat,) and, with the exception of sysprep, the...
Dreamweaver – ‘You Need To Install The Legacy Java SE 6 Runtime’
KB ID 0001213 Problem I used to use Dreamweaver all the time, it was used to design and build the site and handle all the uploads etc. Since I moved to WordPress I don’t use is as much. But it’s still a great code editor so I still fire it up on occasion. At least I did until this started happening; To open “dreamweaver” you need to install the legacy Java SE 6 runtime. Click “More info…” to...
Windows BranchCache (Hosted and Distributed)
KB ID 0001212 Problem The purpose of BranchCache is, (as the name implies) to cache files in branch sites, without the need for a local file server or DFS. There are essentially two deployment models, In Hosted Mode a server in the branch caches the files locally as they are requested by clients. This works because the main file server provides a hash of the requested file, the branch server will download it, and if another client...
CentOS 7 – Serving HTTPS with Apache2
KB ID 0001210 Problem This week I’ve been working on changing the site over to https. Buying a digital certificate used to be an expensive long winded affair, but not anymore. A quick internet search turned up a 3 year SSL certificate for less than 15 quid. Getting the certificate was the easy bit, getting it installed so that Apache would use it was another ‘challenge’. On a scale of one to ten, I’m about a...
Windows RDWeb – Remote Desktop Shortcut Missing
KB ID 0001208 Problem As soon as you start publishing apps to your RDWeb server the ‘Remote Desktop’ icon disappears. Now there’s a good reason for this, it stops users having a desktop open, then opening apps on multiple different servers, and the whole thing turning into a resources nightmare. But what if you only have one RDS server? Solution To get the shortcut back you need to change a registry key. Navigate...
RDS – Custom Start Menu (Remove Administrative Tools)
KB ID 0001207 Problem Why is it so difficult to remove Administrative tools! The one folder you might not want your users having access to is on everyones start menu by default? I’ve seen posts saying to change the permissions so users can’t run the snap-in’s in that folder, and other posts that suggest removing it from the ‘all users’ profile, and yet more posts that say remove it in preferences with a...
Linux (CentOS 7) Generating CSR (Certificate Signing Requests)
KB ID 0001206 Problem If you want to use digital certificates on your CentOS server, then you will need to generate a CSR. It does not matter if you want to purchase a publicly signed certificate, or even if you are going to sign your own. Below is how to generate a CSR for a single web host. Note: Most cert vendors now require a minimum key length of 2048 so thats what I’m going to use. And I’m assuming you have openSSL...