Manually ‘Installing’ Microsoft Integration Services Drivers
KB ID 0001512 Problem If your OS is 2008R2 or newer then you wont need to do this as the drivers are already included. But what if you have a machine that you want to put the drivers in before you virtualise or migrate it. Well if you mount the ISO and run it this happens; Unsupported Guest Environment The Hyper-V integration services can only be installed inside of a virtual machine running Hyper-V Bah! You are not the boss of me! I...
Domain Controller Wont Boot: Stop Code ‘0x00002e2’
KB ID 0001494 Problem I had this problem after a VMware host upgrade last night, this domain controller would not boot, I tried ‘Last Known Good Configuration’, I tried ‘Safe Mode’ it would not boot. More out of desperation than procedure, I tried to boot to ‘Directory Services Restore Mode’ and it booted up (hooray!) I tried all the client’s usual passwords, and could not log in, I messaged...
Getting a Servers Serial Number (Remotely)
KB ID 0001493 Problem If you have an iLO/iDRAC/EMM, then logging into these will give you the servers serial number, but what if they are not setup/connected, or you don’t know username or password? Then you can use WMI to discover the serial number. Solution From PowerShell; Get-Ciminstance -classname win32_bios -computername {Server-Name} | format-list serialnumber Or if you have RDP/Console access , then from an...
Windows – Lost / Forgotten Password?
KB ID 0000755 Problem There are many reasons why you might want to do this, someone has managed to change a user password and that person is not available, you might simply have forgotten it. Or you might have been given a machine, or bought one from ebay that has come without a password. Also there have been a few times when a user has looked me in the eye and said “I’m typing my password in, but it’s not...
Running Dropbox On Windows Server
KB ID 0001489 Problem If you are here, you have probably already found out that Dropbox is not supported on Windows Server platforms. You can install it and set it up happily but it stops working and needs to be relaunched all the time (manually). I love dropbox! So much I actually pay for it! I run it on my management server and its handy for copying files up into my test network, so I can appreciate how annoying it is having to...
Windows Server DHCP Failover
KB ID 0001488 Problem Applicable to: Server 2008/2012/2016/2019 Even though we have had this functionality for a while, I’m still seeing people deploy DHCP scopes (split 80/20) across two servers? You can deploy multiple DHCP servers to serve the SAME DHCP scopes, in either load balanced, or hot standby deployment. Solution I’m assuming you already have one DHCP server setup and, with a working DHCP scope. Here...