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.
Just a quick post to add to our list of SCCM collection queries. We needed one today for a collection of virtual machines only. This query you can use to create a collection to do this: You can check out our other SCCM collection queries by following this link.
Introduction System Center Updates Publisher (SCUP) is a great tool for IT administrators to use to help push out 3rd party updates. These can include updates for Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat, HP, Dell and Lenovo. Thre are also a large number of catalogs that you can purchase or subscribe to so that you can … Read more
Have you ever been in a position where someone has deleted something that they shouldn’t have done in Active Directory and you desperately need to restore it? Well you can go through your backups and look at restoring that way, but there is a much simplier way to restore any Active Directory object. For having … Read more
I’ve not done a post about SCCM queries for a while now so in addition to a load I did some time ago, I thought I’d bring things up to date with a few new queries starting with Microsoft Server 2019. I’ve been using this one for creating a Windows Server 2019 collection in SCCM … Read more
We recently encountered a problem with our System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) console where some old alerts could not be removed or cleared. Despite confirming that the alerts were no longer relevant, every attempt to clear them resulted in a red X generic Microsoft error, causing the console to crash. What Caused the Issue? The … Read more
If you are running a Windows Server environment and you are becoming increasing low on system drive space, then you may want to consider removing the built in payload files for Windows Features. Windows Server comes with the payload files readily available if you want to add any additional Features or Roles to your server. … Read more
This guide explains Windows Server 2019 evaluation editions and product key usage. It covers activation, limitations, and setup guidance. Following on from our popular posts for evaluation product keys for Server 2008 R2, Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016, this post brings us fully up to date with the evaluation keys for Server 2019. This … Read more
There are many reasons as to why you would need to identify an Active Directory Organisational Unit’s Distinguished Name. Most techies out there will use an AD distinguished name when writing or using PowerShell scripts. However, quickly finding what the Distinguished name of a particular OU is not immediately clear. You can click on the … Read more
We recently had a situation where we needed to upgrade our SQL server that had the System Center Service Manager (SCSM) databases on it. This meant that we would need to migrate the databases from the old server to the new server. We thought that this would be a fairly straight forward task and it … Read more
We recently carried out some work for a client who had a completely ruined installation of System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). Who had done what to it, we may never know, but it was clear that the only fix was to start again. This was not such a bad thing as they did want to … Read more
We were running through our list of servers and looking at what each one was doing in terms of Domain Controllers, Exchange servers, SQL servers, System Center servers etc when we noticed that we had quite a few servers that were using pretty small databases but had a large amount of host resource allocated to … Read more
Group Policy is an awesome tool for IT Departments to ensure that their end user computers have the correct enforcement settings on them. It also ensures that company policies are met while also helping to keep security measures in place. The wide range of policies available to IT Departments via Group Policy, means that computers … Read more