Right-clicking on the Task Manager’s network throughput graph can give you some nice details on your traffic. This will work on Windows 8, 8.1 and the equivalent Server editions 2012 and 2012 R2. Note that the statistics are only gathered while the Task Manager process is running and are not cumulative. For cumulative results, you can use the Get-NetAdapterStatistics | fl cmdlet.
Say you’re trying to speed up your VM deployments and create a template with Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2, and in the process to clean up some valuable HD space you run something like the following:
Get-WindowsFeature | Where-Object -FilterScript { $_.Installed -Eq $FALSE } | Uninstall-WindowsFeature –Remove
What that’ll do is remove the binaries off any uninstalled feature and save you a few gigs… BUT you will need the media, or the sources in a share, any time you want to install a feature, which is fine… as long as your template does not get updated. The moment you run Windows Update and go through the motions, your media will no longer work if you want to add features, and installations will fail with something like this:
Error: 0x800f081f
The source files could not be found.
Use the “Source” option to specify the location of the files that are required to restore the feature. For more information
on specifying a source location, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=243077.
To update your sources so that you can use them when installing features, you can use the install.wim file on your media and grab the latest patches using WSUS Offline Updater (http://www.wsusoffline.net/), then merge the updates with the sources. Here’s how:
When it comes time to install features, just use Add-WindowsFeature with -source:wim:\\server\share\install.wim:4 (note the Index number at the end).
For more detail, you can check out this TechNet article in combination with WSUS Offline to help you with the patch downloads.
Thanks for reading!
If you’re missing the nice little graph and metrics that show in your Task Manager’s Performance tab on Windows 8 and 8.1, but not on 2012 and 2012 R2, all you have to do is run:
diskperf -Y
Before:
After:
Instead of hunting down Domain Controllers in ADSS and replicating each manually after some last-minute changes, you can run the following repadmin command to run a sync against all the connections:
repadmin /syncall /APed
The /APed stands for All-partitions, Push, Enterprise-cross-sites and Distinguished names.
This will replicate all domain controllers simultaneously.
If you ever want to query AD for Certification Authorities, skip ADSI Edit… there’s a quick way to do it using certutil. Here’s how:
certutil -config – -ping
Note the extra empty dash between -config and -ping is needed to query the list of CAs.
Credit for the useful command goes to colleague and UC ninja Jeff Carlson.
To set the timezone on a Server Core 2008 R2/2012, or any other version if you fancy CLI, use the following:
TZUTIL /G to list the current timezone
TZUTIL /L to list all available timezone settings
TZUTIL /S “Central Standard Time” to set your timezone to CST as example
Also useful is the w32tm tool to change settings around the Windows Time Service, such as setting up a manual NTP peer or forcing a time resync.
If you’re reading this, chances are that you just installed Windows Server 2012 in the recommended instance of Server Core, and upon boot, you get the nice little cmd.exe window but nothing else. Here’s how you get started using PowerShell cmdlets to configure it:
Rename: Rename-Computer computername
Reboot: Restart-Computer
Configure an IP: New-NetIPAddress -IPAddress x.x.x.x -InterfaceAlias “Ethernet” -DefaultGateway x.x.x.x -AddressFamily IPv4 -PrefixLength 24 (or whatever your subnet mask is)
Configure a DNS server: Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias “Ethernet” -ServerAddresses x.x.x.x
Join a domain: Add-Computer -DomainName domain.com
You can start using Server Manager after that to install roles and features, and configure them. If you can’t use Server Manager remotely, you might want to run Configure-SMRemoting.exe -enable and maybe disable/modify the Windows Firewall rules using MMC from another system
Given that I’ve posted about the weaknesses of WEP, and how it can be easily cracked in about 15 minutes, I wanted to write about how to secure your corporate wireless environment and keep script kiddies out of your network.
Most companies and wireless AP manufacturers started moving towards WPA-PSK as a default setting for wireless networks. Just recently I’ve learned (and tested) using tools such as coWPAtty to crack WPA-PSK networks that use TKIP and do a brute-force attack on the key. While this does not present such a huge security risk as using WEP does, it still opens the door for sites that use weak WPA keys. Since WPA is stronger, but they key can be the weak point now, is there a way to generate “dynamic” keys? better yet, to generate new keys for every single client station, every time they log on?
The answer is YES! We use WPA/WPA2 Enterprise and RADIUS to create a practically impossible to hack wireless network that offers computer+user access granularity and management, and even easy deployment through Group Policy. Doesn’t that sound cool???
To prepare for the next posts, you’ll need the following: