macOS: Microsoft Outlook Search Broken
KB ID 0001754 Problem I’ve had to contend with Outlook Search Broken on Windows clients many times, but not being able to search my ‘sent’ and ‘deleted’ items has a detrimental effect on my productivity. Outlook Search Broken Fix This can happen if the folder/drive that your Outlook profile is in is Blocked/Prevented access by ‘Spotlight’ but in my case that wasn’t the problem. Close...
Remote Desktop Services: RDS Sizing Calculations
KB ID 0001753 Problem This is a horrible subject to find any decent information on. Microsoft are typically ‘vague’ and most people are stuck with using trial and error, or massively overestimating hardware to be on the safe side. I get asked this occasionally and, just like Microsoft, it’s a question I don’t like to answer! People are reticent to tell you that you need ‘x’ amount of CPU and...
Exchange Stopped Working?
KB ID 0001749 Problem I see various posts in online forums, and the process is held up because a lot of techs can’t do basic troubleshooting on their Exchange deployments. So I thought I’d put together some basic ‘first steps’ for you to do when your ‘Exchange Stopped Working’ This way you can at least get an error code to search for or a better idea of what’s going on. Exchange Stopped...
How Many Users in AD? (User Count)
KB ID 0001748 Problem I had to get some stats from a number of customers earlier today, one of the stats I needed was the user count from within their respective Active Directories. If you have a tedious job to do, there’s usually a PowerShell command to help! Getting Object Numbers From Active Directory User Count (Get-ADUser -Filter *).Count Computer Count (Get-ADComputer -Filter *).Count Group Count (Get-ADGroup -Filter...
Enable Remote Desktop (Remotely)
KB ID 0001747 Problem Let’s say you want to RDP to a remote server (imagine such a thing!) But some doofus didn’t enable RDP? Well you can enable Remote Desktop via group policy and wait a while. I used to connect to the registry remotely and change the key that enabled RDP, but now you can do it with a simple PowerShell command. Not only will it enable Remote Desktop, it will also allow RDP on the Windows firewall (if...
Azure Traffic Manager (DNS Failover)
KB ID 0001740 Problem Why Azure Traffic Manager? I had to price up a hardware load balancer (ADC) a couple of weeks ago for a client. I wont mention the vendor, (though I’m sure you can guess). Over 3 years it was going to cost (for a pair) about £100k, (so about 33k a year). That included the global DNS failover, this was so they, (the client) could fail over their services between multiple data centres. OK there are other ADC...