Cisco ASA IKEv2 – ‘Failed To Allocate Memory’
KB ID 0001218 Problem This week I was trying to get a VPN tunnel up for a client. They wanted a tunnel from their Cisco ASA into Microsoft Azure. Normally I’d use IKEv1 (because I know how to troubleshoot it!) But the guys running the site in Azure were using policy routing, which needs IKEv2. So I converted from IKEv2 to IKEv2. As I said I’m used to debugging IKEv1, but not IKEv2, so I was struggling to make sense of...
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...
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...
Windows Server – Disk Performance Missing From Task Manager?
KB ID 0001203 Problem If your machine is struggling, a good place to look first is the performance tab on ‘Task Manager’ Here you can see CPU and Memory Stats and how our network cards are performing, but wheres the disk stats? Solution Before you can see them you need to enable them, open a PowerShell, (or an administrative command window). and run the following command; diskperf -y Now re-open task manager and go to...
Windows – Suppress the ‘First Run’ Welcome to Windows Animation
KB ID 0001186 Problem I don’t like ‘first-run’ dialogs, Internet Explorer is annoying enough, Now Windows and Office insist on playing me a film clip when they start for the first time. I’m a busy guy I have things to do, stop asking me questions and making recommendations! It takes this long to create a user profile? I don’t think so. Solution You can do this by local policy on the machine, but domain...
Microsoft – NDES Site Shows ‘HTTP Error 500.0 – Internal Server Error’
KB ID 0001181 Problem I was doing some testing for a client this week, a while ago I had deployed a three tier PKI solution for them, and as part of the rollout we deployed NDES for their network devices, (they were going to use certificates to secure site to site VPNs). The client was concerned, and wanted the auto renewal process testing. This could not be done on the live system. So myself and a colleague went to the test bench, I...
Exchange – ‘Not all the required authentication methods were found’
KB ID 0001180 Problem I had to visit a client who had recently gone through an Exchange migration, now his external mail clients were having a nightmare staying connected to Outlook Anywhere. I ran the Exchange connectivity tester and got this; Additional details Not all the required authentication methods were found Methods Found: Basic Methods Required: NTLM Solution Looks like an open and shut case, someone forgot to enable...