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 are using Microsoft Server 2016 you will notice that it is now in the server core setup. If you have experience of using Server Core then you should be fine, but if you have not, it can be a little daunting. Is the simple process of adding a new virtual hard disk completely … Read more
Administrative Templates files are divided into .admx files and language-specific .adml files for use by Group Policy administrators. The changes that are implemented in these files let administrators configure the same set of policies by using two languages. Administrators can configure policies by using the language-specific .adml files and the language-neutral .admx files. Administrative Templates … Read more
When you create a new System Center Orchestrator Runbook and you have checked it in ready to use, you may not see it in systems that will want to use it, like Configuration Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit or Service Manager. This is due to authorisation cache not updating and as so, not showing the newly … Read more
lntroduction If you are using WSUS in your environment, you may want to run a scheduled task to cleanup old updates and compress some of the larger updates to free up space on your server. A good way of doing this is to run a Powershell script which will take care of all your cleanup … Read more
INTRODUCTION This post will show you how to get the username of a SID. This will help you when you need to make amendments within a computers registry for HKEY_CURRENT_USER (HKCU). GUIDE Open a command prompt on the computer that a change is required for and run the followinng command: wmic useraccount get name, sid, … Read more
If you are using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) then you may have Management Packs in your system that you may longer want – especially if, like me, you go and add as many as you can in blissful ignorance expecting to get lots of tasty data. Then realising that this is a terrible idea … Read more
We recently dealt with an issue for a customer where a few of their server event logs where full of Group Policy error. The error in question was: Event Type: Error Event Source: Group Policy Local Users and Groups Event Category: (2) Event ID: 8194 Date: 30/06/2017 Time: 10:27:12 AM User: NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM Computer: WINDC1 … Read more
If you have started a task sequence in Configuration Manager and you hit a problem, the last thing you want to do is to have to go through the reboot process back into Windows PE. So, if you want to just restart the task sequence without rebooting, carry out the following steps: Press F8 to … Read more
If you are using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) then you may want to enable agent proxy on all your agents. If you want to do this then you can use the power of Powershell to carry this out. Just open up a Powershell command box and use the following command: get-SCOMagent | where {$_.ProxyingEnabled … Read more
If you are trying to install System Center Service Manager Data Warehouse then you may run into an issue on the Configure Analysis Services for OLAP cubes wizard page where it states that The server is not available: We ran into this issue a while ago and we checked everything that we could find on … Read more
With the recent ransomware attack across the world, IT departments should now been fully patched but also be taking steps to help protect themselves in the future. One way of trying to stop encryption of your files on network shares is to utilise the free File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) tool. This tool has been … Read more
If you are using System Center Operations Manager and you want to bulk remove multiple Management Packs, then you can use the power of the Operations Manager Shell to carry it out. First of all, you need to open up the Operations Manager Shell. Then you should run the following command: where: “*Microsoft.SQLServer*” = the … Read more