Tag: Windows 10

Categories
Home Lab Virtualization Vmware

Home Lab 2.0 – The Beast

Continuing on our series on my Home lab we now move into present day. Well…. a few months ago at least. As I mentioned in my previous post about my Razor Blade 15, I used that as my home lab until I was able to procure parts for my current hyper converged VMware Home Lab.

Below is my part list for The Beast:

Once all the parts came in I managed to get it all hooked up relatively quickly and without issue. I must admit that this is the first time I have ever used a Noctua Cooler, but it is whisper quiet, and nowhere near as expensive as I thought it would be.

So moving away from the hardware I then installed Window 10 and after 4 hours or so of Windows updates I was finally able to install VMware Workstation Pro 15. Well, almost…. it turns out that Virtualization Support was not enabled by default. But I can get into that at a later time. I then built out a Domain Controller (another 4 hours of Windows Updates) and 3 Virtual hosts (no Windows Updates). Once the hosts were built I then deployed a VCSA appliance.

Now I think I have everything I will need to play with VMware Products. That is until I remembered I don’t have Shared Storage for my Virtual hosts. What ever will I do?!

Stay tuned for my next post in this series, especially if you are looking to build a home lab on the cheap.

I hope you found this helpful and if so please share it with your friends, we could really use your support.

Categories
Active Directory Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Active Directory Time Sync Settings

So I was recently asked by a client: “Why is the time on my PC 5 minutes off from my phone?”

Now this is a small environment, a very small environment (1 Server and 7 workstations). The first thing I thought about was what does the server clock look like? So I remoted into the server and sure enough it had the same time as the workstation.

I went and checked the registry and found that the server was pointed get its time from time.windows.com, but for some reason that was not working.

I then used the following command to point it to several of the pools hosted by NIST.gov

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:time-a-g.nist.gov,time-b-g.nist.gov,time-c-g.nist.gov,time-d-g.nist.gov /syncfromflags:manual /reliable:yes /update

After that I restarted the W32Time (Windows Time) service to make the update work.

Once that is done it should force a resync of the time service which could take some time to update and to sync with all the workstations.

I hope you find this post helpful, and if so please share it with your friends.

The More You Know: Unlocking Windows God Mode

Today I wanted to talk about this is a little known feature that has existed on in Windows based workstations since at least Windows 7 when I first heard about it. Since then this “folder” for lack of a better work has been following me around to every PC I have had since then.

At first glance it looks like your Windows Control Panel on Steroids

As you can see from the screen shot, There are about 219 (on my machine, your mileage may vary) settings that you can edit.

To gain access to this you first need to start off by creating a new folder. When the folder is created and you are asked to give it a name you will need to insert this String into the field.

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Press Enter and the icon will change from this

To this

I hope you found this helpful and informative, and I look forward to you coming back soon.

PowerShell – Windows Update report to .CSV

A while back I was asked by my boss to come up with a way to get a report of all the Windows Updates installed on a remote server that is at a client’s site and that we do not have access to.

I thought to myself that he must be crazy to think that we could even find a utility that would enable us to do that.

Well….. Apparently with the right Power Shell Commands you can do it. Here is the Syntax for the Script that you will need to save as a .ps1

$Session = New-Object -ComObject “Microsoft.Update.Session”
$Searcher = $Session.CreateUpdateSearcher()
$historyCount = $Searcher.GetTotalHistoryCount()
$Searcher.QueryHistory(0, $historyCount) | Select-Object Date,
   @{name=”Operation”; expression={switch($_.operation){
       1 {“Installation”}; 2 {“Uninstallation”}; 3 {“Other”}}}},
   @{name=”Status”; expression={switch($_.resultcode){
       1 {“In Progress”}; 2 {“Succeeded”}; 3 {“Succeeded With Errors”};
       4 {“Failed”}; 5 {“Aborted”}
}}}, Title | Export-Csv -NoType “$Env:userprofileDesktopWindows Updates.csv”

The result looks something like this:

I hope you find this post helpful and are able to use this going forward.

Really Strange Wireless Issue

So I had a very strange wireless issue tonight. I have a Razer Blade 2018 Laptop and I use Google WiFi Access Points in the main floor of my house.
When connecting to my normal WiFi network I would get a notification saying I was not connected to the internet. I checked my IP address and a few times I would get nothing, another I would get an APIPA address, and other times I would get just the default Gateway.
I narrowed down the issue to being only with my laptop as all other devices worked fine. I rebooted the routers about 3 times after disabling and enabling IPv6.
I eventually looked at my clients that were connected and found my laptop on the list, even though it was saying it didn’t have an IP and could not get to the internet. It listed my laptop as having a wired connection, which makes no sense at all as this laptop does not have an Ethernet port.
I then set a Static IP and found that I could not get to the internet. I started digging through my WiFi Settings and found an option to present a different MAC address every time I connect to a WiFi access point. I then disconnected and reconnected and it Worked!!!
I do not understand why it worked or what the heck is going with my router that it is not accepting connections normally.
I will continue to work on this in the morning and will update when I have more information.
I think I am going to have to open a support case with Google… Ugh


UPDATE: I checked my laptop when I woke up, things were still working. I did a Windows Update and rebooted. Thing continued to work, Then I updated my Razer Software and rebooted, and things stopped working on my Primary WiFi. I can still use my Guest Wifi like a champ. 
I then opened a ticket with Google and after troubleshooting I am no longer able to connect to the guest network. 
I am going to try another Rollback to see if that resolves my issue.

UPDATE: So I am still waiting for Google Support to get back to me. But that does not mean that I am going to sit on my thumbs. So I installed the Razer Cortex App from the Synapse Store and it was able to generate a report of what is going on with my laptop. I discovered that my laptop had an invalid version of the Intel Wireless – AC 9260 Driver which was throwing issues in the Event log.

So I went on Intels Download site and performed an update on the driver installed, and after a reboot, things are working. I have shutdown the laptop 3 times so far and it is still working. Fingers Crossed that it stays this way. 

Scenario 002 – Computer Hard Disk Drive crashed or not working

Recently I was picking my kids up from a family friend’s house and through normal chit chat in the conversation it was brought up that their family computer’s HDD had failed or “Crashed”. After giving them my sympathy for their loss (some work document and Tons of Family Photos and Videos) something clicked in my brain. I have been out of the game for a long time in terms of being a full time desktop support technician, not to say that I do not do it, however my sights are now on Virtualization and Messaging these days. Anyway back in the day when I used to work for large companies doing desk side support where end users would prefer to save data to their local HDD rather than network drive due to 10 Meg Ethernet or Token Ring network connection (no this is not meant to age me but rather how old the network was).

So lets just say that because this was the norm for their corporate culture we had a lot of issues with people losing data. However my team and I became very good at performing miracles and bring a drive back from the dead.

While this is still in my head I figured I would share this information with you.

Please note that I am not taking responsibility for any damage that you may do to equipment. This is just to share my war stories and if it helps someone out of a bind then great!

Issue:
 Drive will not spin up or there is a clicking noise

Solution:
Try sticking the HDD into the freezer for a few hours (we used to do about 16 hours) and then try to power the drive up again. More times than not it will work but your time is limited so get your data quickly.

Notes:
Do not put your drive on top of ice or anything moist (putting it into a plastic bag might be smart).

Issue:
Drive powers on and spins with no clicking but is not detected by OS or BIOS.

Solution:
Here is where working for a large company with tons of machines with the same model comes in handy. If you have a spare drive that is the same Make and Model you can use a torx screw driver to take the controller card off of the drive and put it onto the defective drive. This should allow the drive to be seen by the OS so you can get your data off.

Notes:
By doing this you are voiding the warranty of your drives so make sure you know the risk before you proceed.