Install VMware tools is grayed out in Workstation
Came across this problem today and couldn’t find any Google hits that helped me. Finally hit upon a solution. VMware tools requires the guest to have a CD drive. In my case the physical host doesn’t...
View ArticleAdding DHCP scope options via PowerShell
Our deployment team needed a few DHCP options set for all our scopes. There was a brickload of these scopes, no way I was going to go to each one of them and right-click add the options! I figured this...
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FYI: Self Encrypting Drives must be uninitialized for BitLocker Hardware...
Got myself a new 1TB Crucial MX200 SSD today. This is a Self Encrypting Drive like my other SSDs. When I tried enabling BitLocker on it as I usually do, I noticed that it was asking me about how to...
View ArticlePowerShell – Create a list of all Exchange mailboxes in an OU with mailbox...
As the title says, here’s a one-liner to quickly create a list of all Exchange mailboxes in an OU with mailbox size, Inbox size, Sent Items size, and the number of items in each of these folders....
View ArticleRun HP USB Key Utility from Windows 7
The HP USB Key Utility can be used to write an SPP ISO to a bootable USB drive. If you run it on a Windows Desktop though it refuses to run because it requires a Windows Server OS. To work around this...
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DNS zone and domain
Once upon a time I used to play with DNS zones & domains for breakfast, but it’s been a while and I find myself to be a bit rusty. Anyways, something I realized / remembered today – a DNS domain is...
View ArticleWindows – View hidden network interface IP address
Was troubleshooting something in VMware, I ended up copying the actual files of a VM from one datastore to another and re-adding it to a host (because the original host was stuck entering into...
View Article[Aside] Bridgehead Server Selection improvements in Server 2008 R2
Came across this blog post when researching for something. Long time since I read anything AD related (since I am more focused on VMware and HP servers) at work nowadays. Was a good read. Summary of...
View ArticleThe NETWORK SERVICE account
Someone asked me why a certain service worked when run as the NETWORK SERVICE account but not as a service account. Was there anything inherently powerful about the NETWORK SERVICE account? The short...
View ArticleFixing “The DNS server was unable to open Active Directory” errors
For no apparent reason my home testlab went wonky today! Not entirely surprising. The DCs in there are not always on/ connected; and I keep hibernating the entire lab as it runs off my laptop so...
View ArticleDNS request timed out
Whenever I’d do an nslookup I noticed these timeout messages as below: C:\>nslookup www.msftncsi.com Server: win-dc01.rakhesh.local Address: 10.50.0.20 DNS request timed out. timeout was 2 seconds....
View ArticleCannot ping an address but nslookup works
Had an odd thing happen yesterday. I could nslookup names from my computer but couldn’t ping them. Ping would give an error as below: Ping request could not find host somehost.somedomain. Please check...
View ArticleCannot ping an address but nslookup works (contd)
Earlier today I had blogged about nslookup working but ping and other methods not resolving names to IP addresses. That problem started again, later in the evening. Today morning though as a precaution...
View ArticleThe “Administrators” group
Note to self: the “Domain Admins” and “Enterprise Admins” groups aren’t the primary groups in a domain. The primary group is the “Administrators” group, present in the “Builtin” folder. The other two...
View ArticleStub zones do not need zone transfer
At work there was some confusion that creating stub zones requires the master servers to allow zone transfers to the servers holding the stub zones. That’s not correct and oddly I couldn’t find any...
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Stub zones do not need zone transfer (with screenshots!)
I had to write an email about this and so take the trouble to set up a test zone and create screenshots. Figured I might as well put it in a blog post too. Exhibit A: An AD integrated zone called...
View ArticlePause a DNS zone on all DNS servers
Here’s how I paused a zone on all the DNS servers hosting that zone: Get-DnsServerResourceRecord -ComputerName SomeDnsServer -RRType NS -ZoneName "zone" | %{ Suspend-DnsServerZone -Name "zone"...
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A problem occurred while trying to add the conditional forwarder
I was trying to create a conditional forwarder on my work DNS servers and kept hitting this cryptic error message: I was trying to create a conditional forwarder called some.sub.zone.com. At first I...
View ArticleExporting and Importing Windows DNS zones
Exporting a DNS zone is easy. Use the dnscmd. C:\> dnscmd DNS-SERVER /zoneexport "blah.com" "blahexport.txt" DNS Server DNS-SERVER exported zone blah.com to file...
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KiTTY with Fedora 22/ OpenSSH 6.9 gives a blank screen and hangs
The KiTTY SSH client for Windows gives a blank screen and hangs when connecting to my Fedora 22 box (which runs OpenSSH 6.9). KiTTY is a fork of PuTTY, which I am happy with, so there’s no particular...
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