Windows DNS Forwarder Population

A customer contacted me today asking why when they promoted all these domain controllers, they had old DNS forwarders automatically configur...

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Data Deduplication Enhancement in Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2012 R2 has a new feature which I can see very handy in the real world especially with VDI environments which have lots of Vi...

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Event Viewer Tasks

I just want to touch against a feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 - 2012 which I believe is very cool.  Windows Event Viewer has the ability ...

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Enable Firewall Logging on Windows

Are your packets being dropped by Windows Firewall?  Want an insight into what is going on?  Simply open local group policy on a workstation...

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DNS Host A Record Being Deleted on Server Reboot

Our company Avantgarde Technologies was performing a domain controller upgrade for a client from Server 2008 R2 domain controllers to Server...

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The folders cannot be queried. Element not found.

In in the process of setting up a new DFS Namespace server at a remote site for a customer, I faced an issue where I was unable to utilize t...

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Newly Built Hyper-V 2012 R2 Server Blue Screening

We experienced an issue with a newly built Hyper-V 2012 R2 server running on Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacentre edition with all the latest c...

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Legacy File Servers with User Profile Disks

I have been involved in a number of Remote Desktop Services 2012 R2 deployments and from my experiences, I recommend to my clients to only u...

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SSTP VPN Bug with Server 2012 R2

Tonight I stumbled across what appears to be a bug/glitch with Server 2012 R2 when attempting to setup an SSTP VPN connection.  I completed ...

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Testing GRE Protocol with PPTP VPN connections

In this post I am going to show you how to test GRE Protocol is open and working when setting up PPTP VPN Servers.  GRE Protocol being block...

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Direct Access Clients Cannot Establish Network Connectivity after NLS Becomes Unavailable

In Microsoft Direct Access Deployments, you need to configure a server (or server cluster) on your network to act as a Network Location Serv...

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Test Application for Group Policy Software Installation Troubleshooting

Sometimes when diagnosing problems with Group Policy software deployment, it is good to try a different application to rule out issues with ...

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How to Change Network Profile in Registry for 2008 Server

In a previous post I wrote about how to change the network location or "firewall profile" in Windows Server 2012 using PowerShell ...

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Remove Power Shell and Server Manager Pinned Icons from Start Menu Server 2012

In Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 by default all users have a Power Shell icon and a Server Manager icon pinned to their sta...

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Windows Server 2012 R2 Print Managmenet Console - Displays No Printers

There is a bug in Windows Server 2012 R2 which causes Print Management Console to display no printers as shown in the screenshot below.  Thi...

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Distributed File Server Replication on Windows Server 2012 R2 Bug 2951262

I came across a bug with Windows Server 2012 R2 where a spoke server randomly failed to replicate to the hub server.  In total there were th...

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PowerShell - Nightly DFS-R Database Backups

Windows Server 2012 R2 provides a new feature allowing customers to export and import the DFS-R database located in "System Volume Info...

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PowerShell - Locate Missing SYSTEM Permissions from Folder Structure

I am in the middle of a DFS-R project for a customer where I'm provisioning new Windows Server 2012 R2 file servers and migrating the da...

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How to Delete Files which exceed 255 Characters Without 3rd Party Tools

Windows Explorer and many Windows applications including PowerShell are limited to 255 characters max file path.  Whilst this limitation is ...

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