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.
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
We were asked recently about how to use a SCCM package to amend current user registry keys (HCU). To be honest, we didn’t really know, HCU registry changes have always been a bit of a nightmare to manage. However, we started to have a look around and found an excellent guide on how to carry … Read more
Do you need to upgrade your Certificate Authority from SHA1 to SHA2 (SHA256)? Well we recently had to carry this out as a test in a lab environment. None of us knew how to carry this out from the top of our heads, so like all good IT guys, we used the power of Google. … Read more
We came across a problem with our SCCM OSD recently where it was getting through approximately half the build process and then seemingly getting stuck on “Just a moment…” before timing out and not completing the build. This was a bit of a head scratcher as there did not seem to be any crash or … Read more
If you are an IT administrator then the chances are that you have come across issues with trying to download files directly from a website to your server. You would have received this security alert when trying to download: Your current security settings do not allow this file to be downloaded. Although this is a … Read more
We recently had a problem with our Service Manager database server using massively high RAM usage. It was using up all the RAM we gave it no matter how much extra we allocated to it. So we needed to try and figure out why it was doing this, like all good IT people, we started … Read more
I don’t know about you, but Server Manager loading up every time I login to a Windows Server 2016 machine drives me nuts! This is especially annoying when using my lab as most of the hardware is just old bits of kit that is not being used in production any longer. In older versions of … Read more
If you want to export all your Active Directory users last logged on information, you can carry this out using Powershell and then exporting to CSV format. Guide First of all, you will need to import the ActiveDirectory module if you have not already done so. To do this, just open up a Powershell command … Read more