WSUS Clients not Reporting or downloading updates

I had a large customer where all clients stopped downloading updates in November 2016.  Even after building a new WSUS server, clients would...

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WSUS Console Freezes when the Server Cleanup Wizard

A common administration task of maintaining a WSUS server is cleaning up old legacy updates no longer required running the Server Cleanup Wi...

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Error 0x800f0922 attempting to reprovision DHCP Server

We needed to re-provision a DHCP server running Windows Server 2012 R2 which was recently demoted and the role removed.  When attempting to ...

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Disable RC4 on Windows Servers

The 13 year old RC4 cipher exploit is enabled by default on Server 2012 R2.  If you have a IIS server using a digital certificate facing the...

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How to Patch Windows Server 2003 with Error 0x80072EFF

I have a customer who has 3 forests all running Exchange 2003 on Windows Server 2003... yes in the year 2016 (almost 2017).  Before moving t...

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Direct Access Server not displaying Connection Statistics

A customer of mine had an issue with a Direct Access Server not displaying connection statistics.  My clients are connecting to the server w...

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The Danger of the Local Administrator Account

The local administrator account resides on every Windows Server and is usually in an enabled state.  This account is a major security vulner...

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Error downloading unsupported File Types with IIS

A customer of mine was complained that when users attempted to download unknown file types, they received a "404 - File or directory no...

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DFSR Event ID 6404 - The Replicated Folder has an Invalid Local Path

I was attempting to add a new DFSR node to an existing DFSR Replication Group consisting of 17 file servers.  When adding the server the fol...

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DFSR Backlog Count Not Reducing - Server 2012 R2

Microsoft recently released an update which causes DFSRS.exe CPU usage to hit 100%. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3156418 I wrote a...

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DFSR Service 100% CPU Usage

I had an enterprise DFSR customer of mine with 17 File Server nodes complaining that CPU utilisation was at 100% on numerous DFSR nodes in t...

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Bug with Windows 7 and Access Based Enumeration

I encountered an interesting bug with Windows 7 workstations with Access Based Enumeration enabled on a SMB Share and DFS Namespace running ...

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Windows 7 Computers Rebooting During Day for Updates

A customer was having an issue where Windows 7 computers randomly rebooted during the day for Windows Updates without providing a prompt for...

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Remove Run menu from Start Menu - Policy Bug

Today I stumbled across a bug with Windows 8.1 / 2012 R2 with the Group Policy setting: User Configuration ->Policies -> Administrativ...

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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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