Windows – Stop the Welcome to Internet Explorer from launching via GPO
KB ID 0000459 Problem If your’e logging on as a new user and Internet Explorer has not yet been ran, then it wants to run the “Setup Windows Internet Explorer Wizard”. On just one machine with one user that’s fine, but if you are logging in all over the place, with multiple credentials, this can get quite annoying. Also you might not want your domain users having to do this at all, for security reasons....
Group Policy Preferences and Client Side Extensions
Group Policy Preferences KB ID 0000389 Problem Group Policy Preferences (GPP) first came in with Server 2008 and were enhanced for Server 2008 R2, To be able to apply them to older Windows clients, you need to install the “Client side Extensions” (CSE), You can either script this, deploy with a group policy, or if you have WSUS you can send out the update that way. From windows 7 onwards they are already installed....
Moving Certificate Services To Another Server
KB ID 0001473 Problem If you are retiring a CA Server, or there’s a problem with the server and you want to move Microsoft Certificate Services to another server, the procedure is pretty straight forward. BE AWARE: We are moving the CA Server Name , NOT the Server Name (FQDN), the two things are NOT the same, (you might have called them the same thing!) But a Certificate Authority has a name of its own, and that’s what we...
VMware Horizon: ‘VM With Unsupported Guest OS’
KB ID 0001592 Problem Seen when attempting to deploy Window Server 2016, as an ‘Image’ (Parent VM,) with VMware Horizon View. ‘VM With Unsupported Guest OS’ I double checked, and Server 2016 (Standard and DataCenter) were supported, as was Server 2019 (Standard and DataCenter.) The image also had a new version of the VMware Horizon View agent installed in it? Solution In my case this was an embarrassingly easy...
VMware Converter ‘Unable to Connect to the Network Share’
KB ID 0001583 Problem I don’t think, Ive ever run the VMware Standalone Converter, without at least one error message or popup complaining about something! Today I was trying to convert a clients old Windows Server 2003 document management server, when trying to deploy the agent this happened; Unable to connect to the network share ‘{Sever-name-or-IP} \ADMIN$’. Solution It’s a pretty descriptive error, can you...
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!...
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...