Category Archives: Windows

Top 10 Blog posts of 2017

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Happy New Year!

In 2017 the OxfordSBSGuy.com blog has gone from strength to strength, with 26 posts and 863,000 views. In 2017 I implemented SSL and been working on some tweaks here and there to improve performance.  This year I’m considering a redesign and new hosting is in the pipeline to improve performance further. Thank you for your support.

Below are the top ten articles in 2017

  1. PowerShell: Get-ADComputer to retrieve computer last logon date – part 1 (103,582 views)
  2. PowerShell: Get-ADUser to retrieve password last set and expiry information (83,394 views)
  3. Exchange PowerShell: How to list all SMTP email addresses in Exchange (63,442 views)
  4. How to convert a Hyper-V VHDX to VMDK for VMware Workstation (31,337 views)
  5. PowerShell: Get-ADUser to retrieve login scripts and home directories – Part 1 (31,017 views)
  6. How to install Exchange 2010 (SP3) on Windows Server 2012   (43,232 views)
  7. Server 2012: “Your current security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded” (29,374 views)
  8. Exchange PowerShell: How to enumerate Distribution Lists, managers and members (24,264 views)
  9. Dell PERC: How to clear the foreign configuration on a HDD using the Raid Configuration Utility (21,799 views)
  10. How to resolve VMware Workstation “The network bridge on device ‘VMnet0’ is not running” (21,737 views)

Looking forward to 2018, the industry recently has been focusing on security so I’ll be brushing up on some Security Skills with Sophos and WatchGuard, and with more and more clients moving to Office 365, I intend to write a few more PowerShell scripting to help manage end users and computers in the cloud.

I hope you have a great year!
Carl
www.OxfordSBSGuy.com

How to stop an embedded Excel spreadsheet in OneNote increasing in size

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Microsoft OneNote

I’ve been using OneNote extensively now for a couple of years, but there is one bug bear I have, each time I edit an embedded Excel spreadsheet and save it, the spreadsheet increases in size, so after several separate edits its nearly doubled in size!

I’ve yet to find a solution to stop this from happening, but i have found an easy work around.

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How to turn off Windows Update notifications for users on Server 2016 RDS

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Windows Server

If you are running a Remote Desktop Services (RDS) server (terminal server), you don’t want the end users being notified there are updates to be applied, because they won’t have permission to apply them.

Use this quick GPO setting to disable the end user notification of Windows Updates.

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Where’s Microsoft Edge browser on Server 2016?

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Windows Server
If you are looking for the Microsoft Edge browser on Server 2016, look no further, it isn’t available! This is due to Windows Server 2016 being in the Long-Term Servicing Branch and the quicker rate of change of the Edge browser can’t be supported.

The official response from Microsoft is:
“The Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) versions of Windows, including Windows Server 2016, don’t include Microsoft Edge or many other Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps. These apps and their services are frequently updated with new functionality, and can’t be supported on systems running the LTSB operating systems. For customers who require the LTSB for specialized devices, we recommend using Internet Explorer 11.”

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/deploy/hardware-and-software-requirements

It’s a shame not to have a consistent user experience between Windows 10 and Server 2016 especially in environments that use Remote Desktop Services.



How to enable Windows Time Service Auditing

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Windows Server
Accurate time in a domain environment is essential for authentication between clients and servers to work correctly. Kerberos v5 protocol requires a tolerance of less than 5 minutes, anything more than this and you will get authentication errors.

I’ve recently been investigating a a server who’s time leaped 28 days into the future! So wanted to start auditing the Windows Time service to see what made the change.

So in this blog post I’ll show you how to enable Windows Time service auditing.

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PowerShell: How to use Get-ADUser to list all recently created accounts (and recently changed accounts)

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PowerShell

For the next couple of posts I’ll be looking into AD security and auditing. In this article we’ll look at how to use Get-ADUser to list all recently created accounts.

With the increasing number of cyber attacks, security is at the top of most IT departments agenda. There are many checks you can perform to make sure AD is safe and secure, and that only valid or approved modifications have been made to user accounts. I’ll look at AD auditing in a future post, but this will be a handy snippet of PowerShell to help you identify recently created AD accounts, and a bonus bit of code to identify recently modified accounts!

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