What a year. Virus, disaster, unrest, killer hornets. It’s been challenging to say the least. I’ve been wanting to update this blog for a long time and finally thought to see if I could still get logged in this Saturday morning while I enjoy my first cup of coffee of the day. I’ve got a few posts in mind, hopefully I can get at least some of them done while they are still somewhat relevant. Until then, stay safe.
If you’ve downloaded the trial version of Server 2016 and decided you’d like to just go ahead and put it into to production it’s easy to change the version and save yourself a reinstall of the OS. This article does a good job at explaining the process. The quick version is, at an elevated command prompt enter
dism /online /set-edition:ServerStandard /productkey:WC2BQ-8NRM3-FDDYY-2BFGV-KHKQY /accepteula
That is a KMS key, if you are using a KMS server then you can leave the command as is, if you are using a MAK or retail key just substitute it for the one given. The server will then need to reboot. After you log back in, at an elevated command prompt type: slmgr /ipk WC2BQ-8NRM3-FDDYY-2BFGV-KHKQY and once again use the save key you used in the first command. After that has finished, to activate Windows type the following command:
slmgr /ato
This method worked perfectly for me using a freshly downloaded trial version of 2016 and a MAK key from the volume licensing center.
While trying to switch around my Hyper V replication scheme so I could take one of my servers offline for a while so I could expand its RAID 10 array and change the way I had it the array partitioned to “One Big RAID 10”. I ran into an issue where I wasn’t able to replicate to an old server I had stood up temporarily running Hyper V Server 2012r2, this was just the free hyper v server, not 2012r2 std. The error I got was “Hyper-V failed to enable replication for virtual machine ‘DC2’: The operation timed out (0x00002EE2).”After many failed attempts and lots of scratching on my rapidly balding head I found this post on the microsoft technet forum that fixed the issue for me. I was sceptical that it would work since I had already disabled the firewall, but adding these rules via powershell did the trick. Here is how I implemented the fix.
Now try to enable replication for one of your VMs.
I recently ran into a problem where an agency I help purchased some remote desktop licenses from Techsoup. After going through the usual process with the Microsoft Volume Licensing Center no keys were available to do the activation on the server. After much head scratching I found a forum post at Spiceworks that had directions. It’s a bit different that the usual volume license process so I’ll post it below.
f you’ve already set up your licencing server, which you most likely have:
So to sum things up, instead of getting a license key from the VLSC, you use the Authorization number and license number. Weird.
So you have that one user that loves WordPerfect 11 and just can’t live without it. You swap out their machine for nice new Windows 10 box only to find that their favorite app, WP11 in this case, just refuses to save anything once you get it installed. Now I know, it’s really not compatible with Windows 7 and newer operating systems, but can you get it to work without using XP mode? The answer is yes! Simply navigate to the C:/Program Files (x86)/WordPerfect Office 11/Programs/ folder, then locate the PerfectFit Document Management folder and change the name of it to something like “XXPerfectFit Document Management“. The next time you open WP11 you’ll be saving documents like its 2004 again.
Well, I’ve let this blog go long enough and it’s time to get back at it. The last year has been kinda crazy and I’ve had plenty of things come up that would have made for great blog posts but never really had time to put them together. In the near future I hope to give you my thoughts on the sophos sg210 utm device. I’ve been using one for a while now and am not really crazy about it, but more on that later. I’m also moving to a new email encryption platform for google apps called virtru, and I’ll be letting you know how that’s going in the near future.
I ran into this problem the other day after adding yet another MFC device to our network. I added the printer to our 2008 r2 print server and added both x86 and 64bit drivers. But when I tried to add the new printer to the workstations that would be using it, it never showed up when scanning for printers. I double and tripled check settings on the server, made sure I had checked to box for “list in the directory”, but even after waiting several minutes it never showed up. I then found this forum post detailing a group policy setting that if left not configured limits the network printer scan to 20 twenty printers. After making the the changes all our printers are now visible when scanning for printers. So if you find yourself in the same boat you can click the link above to read all the posts concerning it or just do this from the group policy editor:
Go to Computer config
Admin templates
Printers
Add Printer Wizard – Network scan page (Managed Network)
Enable this and setup the types of printers you want to display. If you are like me and just need to show more network printers change Directory Printers to 0 (zero) for unlimited or to whatever limit you like.
We have several copiers at our office that are used for scanning documents to .pdf files, among other things. Last week we added yet another one and I configured the copier to scan the files to a department shared folder just like I’ve done many times before. When testing the new setup I would see the new scanned files in the folder from my machine, but the users in the department that it was set up for only saw an empty folder. Several minutes went by and finally one user could see the file, but the other four or so still could not. So after doing some digging I found several forum posts and Microsoft articles on the subject and a registry hack that did the trick for me. You can find the article from Microsoft here. To sum up the fix, here is what is required. Change the DWORD value for the following registry keys to 0 (zero).
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\
Parameters\FileInfoCacheLifetime
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\
Parameters\FileNotFoundCacheLifetime
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\
Parameters\DirectoryCacheLifetime
And thats all there is to it.
I’ve been running a windows OpenVpn server for over 5 years now. Part of that as a VM and for the last 3 years or so on dedicated hardware. That hardware consisted of an old Dell desktop PC running Windows XP. It was an emergency setup that I just never got back around to fixing permanently. So this week I decided to migrate it to one of my Hyper-V hosts and run it on a 2008r2 Std. VM. I’ve always ran OpenVpn in bridged mode, so when I tried to create the bridge in 2008r2 I found that I would lose network connectivity. I tried deleting and recreating the bridge several times along with multiple reboots, always with the same results. After much googling I ran across an article describing this problem in server 2003r2 and a link to another article describing how to force the TAP nic into compatibility mode due to some NICs not automatically entering into Promiscuous mode which causes the bridge not to be able to pass traiffic. The fix for me was forcing compatability mode on the Microsoft Hyper-V adapter instead of the virtual OpenVpn TAP adapter. To do this simply open an elevated command prompt and type “netsh bridge show adapter” then locate the identification number of the NIC you wish to put into compatibility mode. Next type the following command substituting the number of your prefered NIC for the 1 “netsh bridge set adapter 1 forcecompatmode=enable” Next run the “netsh bridge show adapter” command again to verify that the ForceCompatabilityMode field for the NIC is displayed as Enabled.
I often run into issues where newer versions of IE will not work with some of the websites that our users have to access. The sites only work with IE and most only work correctly with IE8, and no amount of compatibility mode or tweaked setting will give you full functionality when trying to use newer versions. This becomes a real pain when rolling out new computers that come with IE9 and now IE10 preinstalled. You can find some info online and a lot of arguments on the best way to “roll back” to IE8. After ALOT of searching and trial and error, I finally found a Microsoft Fix it that will do it for you fast and easy. It is Microsoft Fix it 50778. Just run it and be done with it.