Load Balance IIS with Microsoft ARR
KB ID 0001573 Problem If you have a lot of IIS servers, and want to load balance between them, then you can either buy a load balancer, or use Microsoft ARR (Application Request Routing). Note: ARR does a lot more than simply load balancing, e.g. it can perform caching, and complex web routing, and even SSL offloading. Here we are just looking at load balancing. I’m going to deploy TWO ARR servers in my DMZ, here I’ve got...
Convert MBR Partitioned Drives to GPT
KB ID 0001407 Problem I got asked if I’d ever had to do this today, I vaguely remember having this problem in the past, but I can’t remember how I solved it. You set the ‘Partition Table Type’ on a disk in Windows, when the drive is first initialised, like so; And the default is MBR, so that usually gets ticked, the problem is MBR only supports disks up to 2TB in size. Now if it’s just a new disk, with...
Remote Desktop Services – Securing By Group Policy
KB ID 0001211 Problem Note: This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s what I use when securing Remote Desktop Services, (Terminal Services) servers. Some of these settings are ONLY for Server 2012 R2 and later. If you have any settings you think are omitted, please comment below. Solution User Access To RDS If you want to create a Domain security group for RDS users than please do so. BE AWARE the ‘Remote Desktop...
Windows 10 & Windows Server Update Error 0x800705b4
KB ID 0001569 Problem I can’t remember Windows being so diabolically bad at simply updating? I built a new 2016 server, simply to create a VM template, and it would not update; There were some problems installing updates, but we’ll try again later. If you keep. seeing this and want to search the web or contact support for information this may help: (0x800705b4) Solution Well that’s a very polite but useless error!...
Exchange: Hide All Contacts From Global Address List
KB ID 0001564 Problem I saw this on EE this evening, so I thought I’d work it out, what if your Global Address List is full of external ‘contacts’, and you want to remove/hide them? Solution First take a look at them, to see you’re not about to cause any damage! Get-MailContact | Where-Object {$_.HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled -eq $false} If you are happy, to remove/hide them from the GAL, simply do the...
vSphere: Presenting Physical Disks to a VM
KB ID 0001563 Problem I’m doing some work presenting StarWind vSAN into VMware ESX. Because we also want ‘disk tiering’ it has to be ran from Microsoft Windows with Storage Spaces*. To do that I needed to present the physical disks in the ESX hosts, (HP DL380 Gen 10s) to the Windows Virtual Machines that StarWind will be running on. *Note: At present, ‘tiering’ cannot be done from the StarWind Linux...