This category contains Windows Server tutorials and guides covering installation, configuration, and troubleshooting across multiple versions including 2012, 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2025. Designed for system administrators and IT professionals managing server environments.
If you have a number of domain controllers within your organisation, you should ensure that they are all replicating correctly without any errors at all. This check should be carried out regularly to be proactive in finding any potential Active Directory issues that you may face. To do this, simply run the following command on … Read more
In Configuration Manager 2012, there is a section under the Monitoring ribbon called Distribution Status. This will give you a lot of information about your distributions and your distribution points. If you look at Distribution Point Configuration Status, this gives you a good understanding of whether your drivers, packages, applications and images have deployed correctly … Read more
If you want to report on machines that have Outlook archive (PST’s) on them, where they are and how big they are, then you can use this guide to create a report that will do this for you using Configuration Manager. First of all, you will need to tell your Software Inventory to look for … Read more
We have recently had problems with our global distribution points in ConfigMgr after the monthly content validation has happened. On some of our distribution points (not all) we are getting and error stating: “Failed to validate content hash” With our monitoring on the Distribution Point Configuration Status looking like this (click the thumbnails for the … Read more
If you installed Windows Server 2012 R2 Core and later realised you need a graphical interface, you can switch to the full GUI without reinstalling the OS. This guide shows you exactly how to install the GUI using PowerShell, including the required source files and common issues. Requirements Before you begin, make sure you have: … Read more
Powershell is becoming more and more important these days and the possibilities for using it are endless. However, there are also a large amount of very basic easy-to-use commands that you should add to your knowledge collection. We all pick up new Powershell commands that help us to do our jobs all the time so … Read more
If you are using Server 2012 R2 Core and you wish to join it to the domain, then you can use this simple Powershell command to do it. Add-Computer -DomainName YOURDOMAIN.COM -Credentials DOMAINUSERNAME -Restart Note that the -Restart command at the end will automatically restart your server once it has completed the joining process. Also … Read more
If you are using Windows 2012 R2 Core or if you just like using Powershell, then you may want to know how to enable Remote Desktop. To do this, you should go into your Core server where you should see a command box. In here, type in Powershell and press enter. This will open up … Read more
We recently have had issues with our Windows 7 operating system deployments seemingly not completing fully. We were getting the following issues: The ConfigMgr client was not fully installed – it was displaying the Site Mode as “Unknown” The ConfigMgr client was not picking up a certificate – it was displaying as “None” The _SMSTaskSequence … Read more
If you want to report on the machines that do not have the ConfigMgr client installed within your Configuration Manager environment then you can run this query directly on your SQL database or you can use it to create a report within SSRS. The query is below and can be altered to fit your own … Read more
Sorry about the recent lack of updates on our site but we have been incredibly busy fixing “real world” IT issues! Its also the silly season for holidays so over the next month updates may be a little sparse but we will try our best! We recently came across a really good blog post by Daniel … Read more
We had reports from a customer this week about strange issues with their Configuration Manager OSD Task Sequences failing. The OSD seemed to work on most machines but a new batch of refurbished laptops would PXE boot but then would fail after the task sequence had been selected with a generic Microsoft error (you know … Read more