Archiving useful IT information
With the newer Microsoft OS’s (both workstations and servers), Microsoft decided to start building a recovery partition AFTER the OS partition. This means if you need to increase the size of the OS partition, you must do some work first to get rid of the recovery partition before you can extend the OS partition size. […]
Continue ReadingSometimes, you may need to convert a certificate to PEM format for use on *nix or non-Windows platforms. Here is a way to do this using PowerShell without any third party software. First, we need to get a cert loaded into a variable. This cert can be pulled from a PFX or loaded directly from […]
Continue ReadingTroubleshooting the Client Check if BITS is running The first step in troubleshooting hardware inventory on a client is to verify the BITS service is running. BITS or Background Intelligent Transfer Service is a Windows service used to transfer data whenever there is bandwidth that is not being used by other applications. BITS also supports […]
Continue ReadingLearn how to PXE Boot both BIOS & UEFI machines with DHCP Policies and Custom Vendor Classes One of the challenges that an IT deployment administrator may face in the field is the ability to boot both BIOS and UEFI machines from the same WDS environment. This is exactly the issue I faced when our organization […]
Continue ReadingIn this article, I will show you how to check the AD Schema version using Powershell. First, you need to log into your Active Directory Domain Controller. If you have more than one domain controller, you should log in to the forest root domain controller. Open PowerShell with Administrator Permission If there is a pop-up screen […]
Continue ReadingIn an ideal world, everything runs as native bitness (64bit program on 64bit OS, 32bit program on 32bit OS) and life goes on. However, sometimes you need to run that legacy 32bit program on a 64bit OS and need to configure things a little differently as a result. How can you detect this WOW64 case (32bit […]
Continue ReadingThis guide will show you how to renew RDS grace period on your hosts. Microsoft gives you 120 days grace period on RDS. I would say that it would be enough to run a pilot or a PoC. I encourage everyone to purchase licenses for your environment and only use this article as a last resort option […]
Continue ReadingState messages contain concise information about conditions on the Configuration Manager client. The state messaging system is used by specific components of Configuration Manager, such as software updates and configuration settings. Configuration Manager clients send state messages to fallback status point or management point site systems to report the current state of operations. You can […]
Continue ReadingIn this post we will be looking at using SCCM dynamic queries to populate collections in our deployments. As a SCCM administrator, you most likely had to plan out mass deployments to all your servers or workstations or even both. How did you go ahead and populate your collections? Queries? Since the introduction of SCCM 2012, […]
Continue ReadingStarting with Windows 10 1809, there is a new way to add RSAT tools to Windows 10. In organizations that use Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM) or WSUS, this may fail because the Features on Demand are not present on the WSUS server. To work around this, you can use the below process to get […]
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