Hi all! I have changed my career path from being a Network & Automation Engineer to focus primarily on AWS CloudOps and DevOps. I plan to do more blog posts as I obtain the big five AWS certs and hopefully help the community by contributing more. I’ll be sure to contribute some code via my… Read More »
On occasion you may need to set up alias connections over UNC across servers that does not match the servers real host name. Here is how you can enable this functionality (Note: This has only been test in Windows Server 2008 R2). A DNS entry for the alias should be in place. Alternately, using a… Read More »
DNSLint is a very robust tool provided for free by Microsoft that allows you to troubleshoot DNS issues more effectively. It has many options, and can even pull useful information from external zones (not just AD integrated zones). When you pull information using this tool, it will create an HTML report in your working directory… Read More »
Understanding BranchCache Solves the problem with Branch Offices connected to a main office via slow WAN links. Helps with users whom complain about slow HTTP and SMB downloads. The caching server can work with Server 2008/2012 and Win 7/8. Uses HTTP(S), SMB, BITS, and ESE DB (Extensible Storage Engine Database) There are two modes –… Read More »
Understanding DAC: New access control method for file system resources used for Access Control, Auditing , and FCI (File Classification Infrastructure). Still based off of (Authentication/Authorization/Auditing). Works as a layer on top of NTFS and Share permissions. Multiple benefits including Protecting (encrypting) sensitive information, compliance and data analysis, and access denied remediation. Windows 7 can… Read More »
What is Failover clustering? High Availibility (HA) is a service level for a given app or service (aka workload). The usually is based on SLA’s with customers. FC is a HA method that protects a service or app from downtime such as failover or fallback. You can set this up as an Active/Passive configuration or… Read More »
If you ever encounter weird Networking issues on the Windows OS that you can’t explain (i.e. network connections getting out to a web page and response returning but the OS doesn’t process it correctly) and disabling/re-enabling the NIC and uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers doesn’t help, a winsock reset may be exactly what you need. A Winsock… Read More »
Some need to know details about Network Load Balancing (NLB) in Server 2012: Each Windows cluster can contain anywhere from 2-32 nodes. It can only be used for stateless (HTTP) protocols, not stateful (file server, DB) NLB can detect when a node is down. It uses heartbeat/health-checks, priority settings, and port rules. Port rules allow… Read More »
For some reason monitoring services do not come enabled by default in Hyper V for Windows Server 2012. However, they do in fact exist. To enable monitoring you will be using the following Poweshell cmdlets which should be run on your Hyper V server: Enable-VMResourceMetering Disable-VMResourceMetering Reset-VMResourceMetering Measure-VM The first PS Cmdlet should be used… Read More »
To install Dig on Windows, download the following .zip files and extract them to your C:\Windows\System32 directory. You could substitute the System32 directory for any directory included in your PATH variable. Once they have been copied over you should now be able to run dig commands from command line like you would in Linux. Dig… Read More »