Friday, August 30, 2013

Remote Desktop Services in 2012

Problem:
In a customer environment they wanted to install RDS and DC on the same server. A nice cheap solution, which have worked perfectly fine in the past. Not so anymore. In Server 2012, RDS requires by default that
  1. A domain controller is present, aka server is member of a domain
  2. the RDS role cannot be installed on the DC
Which means, you need at least two servers for a working installation?
Well no, there is apparently a official workaround from microsoft. It was not easy to find so im posting it here for future reference or until I’ve had time to try it out.
Edit:  A colleague actually tried this out on several machines and it seemed to work as expected.
Solution:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2833839/en-us?sd=rss - Guidelines for installing the Remote Desktop Session Host role service on a computer running Windows Server 2012 without the Remote Desktop Connection Broker role service
References:
http://www.wackytechtips.com/installing-and-configuring-remote-desktop-services-rds-on-windows-server-2012/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2013/07/09/what-s-new-in-remote-desktop-services-for-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831447.aspx - specs about rds 2012.
http://technet.microsoft.com/library/hh831568.aspx - deprecated
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2013/03/14/what-s-new-in-windows-server-2012-remote-desktop-gateway.aspx - changes
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2012/10/30/windows-8-windows-server-2012-remote-desktop-management-server.aspx - new ways of managing rds
http://www.urtech.ca/2013/02/solved-1-hour-to-install-and-configure-a-single-server-remote-desktop-services-on-server-2012/
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/cbffb2d4-ff9d-49ee-a9ce-a60db2262422/managing-server-2012-rds-in-a-workgroup- -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2833839/en-us?sd=rss&spid=16526&wa=wsignin1.0 – ms article regarding standalone rds
http://microsoftplatform.blogspot.nl/








Thursday, August 29, 2013

Previous Version stopped working on network share

Environment: Server 2003 R2

Symptoms:

No previous versions of files are found when looking from client computer on network share. Seems to be set up ok, but when looking at Task Scheduler the job shows error “Could not Start”

image

Event Viewer shows no related errors at the latest runtime.

Solution:

  1. Disable shadow copy and delete all scheduled jobs.
  2. Delete or move files starting with “d42” from folder “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18”
  3. Enable shadow copy on disks and verify that task now can be started manually.

Cause:

Might be the account originally used to create the job doesn’t exist anymore.

References:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822904 - 0x800700d data is invalid.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jhoward/archive/2006/06/22/shadow-copy-failures-scheduled-task-fails-with-general-page-initialization-failed-error-0x8007000d.aspx -

http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2007/03/windows-server-2003-attempt-to-retrieve.html

     

     

     

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Bulk creating and removing mailboxes

To create users in Exchange 2013, when they already exist in AD this script is useful.

foreach ($user in get-content users.txt)
{
Enable-mailbox –identity mydomain\$user –database mailboxdatabase1
write-host "$user is processed."
}

Users are stored in users.txt

To only remove mailbox, but not the AD-user from exchange. This is useful when needing to redo import if something didn’t land where it should.

foreach ($user in get-content DeleteUsers.txt)
{
disable-mailbox –identity mydomain\$user -confirm:$false
write-host "$user is processed."
}

Users are stored in DeleteUsers.txt

Each line contains one username.

References:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj863434%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx

Powershell and Uptimerobot

Uptimerobot can be quite tedious when you need to update many monitors at once. For example say you bought the license for Uptimerobot and n...