During my daily work I encounter a lot of confusion about this topic. Let’s first discuss couple of basic things about the backup of Active Directory and why it is so important to use a Microsoft supported solution. When we are in a Disaster Recovery scenario and we need to restore our Active Directory...
Schedule server reboot via Task Scheduler
Sometimes we need to schedule the reboot of a server after hours. We can do this very easy with Task scheduler and PowerShell. Open Task Scheduler and create a new basic task. Give it a meaningful name: And press Next. Set it to One time and press Next: Set the date and time for...
Azure Site to Site VPN without dedicated VPN hardware device
Today I will be writing about creating a Site to Site (S2S) Virtual Private Network from your Azure virtual network to your on-premises network without the need to use a dedicated VPN hardware device. Requirements: active Azure subscription Azure Resource Group Azure virtual network on-premises VM to install Windows Server 2019 proper firewall settings....
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2019 Update Rollup 1 available
The first update rollup for SCVMM 2019 has been release by Microsoft on February 4th. This fixes several issues: Unable to add Windows Server 2019 hosts in untrusted domain to SCVMM. Changes to VM network adapter or VM network overwrites associated ACL. Unable to pull LLDP information on pNICs bount to a vSwitch. Long running service template deployments time out after 3 hours. Timeout parameter can now...
System Center Virtual Machine Manager ports and protocols.
Port and protocol exceptions Connect Port/protocol Details Configure VMM server to VMM agent on Windows Server-based hosts/remote library server 80: WinRM; 135: RPC; 139: NetBIOS; 445: SMB (over TCP) Used by the VMM agent Inbound rule on hosts Can’t modify VMM server to VMM agent on Windows Server-based hosts/remote library server 443:HTTPS BITS data...
Configure network interface order in Windows Server 2016/2019 and Windows 10
I get asked a lot about this: What is the easiest way to configure network interface order? The simplest way is to use the network metric in order to be able to actually configure this order. The order in which adapters appear in a list is determined by the IPv4 or IPv6 interface metric.When...
“Watch” command in Windows
These days I needed to be able to check on the execution of a repetitive task. If I would use linux I could use the watch command but I am a Windows guy. So I came up with an alternative – I created a bat file with the below content: To change the duration...
Finding the WSUS server from which updates are downloaded
Open an administrative command prompt and type: Reg query „HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate” /s |findstr „WUServer” The result is something like below: WUServer REG_SZ http://wsusservername.domain.comUseWUServer REG_DWORD 0x1 Done!
Cool study about cybersecurity trends
Stumbled across a very interesting study “Considerations on Challenges and Future Directions in Cybersecurity” by the National CyberInt and CERT-RO organizations. It can be accessed here: https://cert.ro/doc/CybersecurityRO2019.pdf Take time to read it as it is quite detailed and very long.
Lab building tool
Hi All, I would like to recommend a tool for building labs quickly – WSLAB. You can download it here https://github.com/microsoft/WSLab