Knight-time Ramblings

Yet another example of Microsoft's inability to provide a polished implementation of, well, anything. To overcome the HTTP 500 Something...

My notes on repairing broken systems that no longer install updates.  When /restorehealth fails, check the following: Perform chkdsk /f on B...

 So I've been running into this a fair bit of late. After chasing down the rabbit hole on the first one, worrying about virtual disk cor...

I've had this error pop up from time to time. Most of the time turning off Persistent Bitmap Caching fixes the problem. It can also fix ...

If anyone else is dumb enough like me to in-place upgrade their 2012 R2 Essentials install to 2016 Essentials, then there's some extra s...

My first experience with a Sophos Access Point was a painful affair, as the Access Point (an AP55) was on a subnet sitting behind a separate...

I keep forgetting the appcmd syntax to set/unset maxBandwidth so I can throttle overall WSUS downloads. This gives me the benefit of reducin...

I'm never going to remember this next time I have to do it - saving it for posterity (and the ability for me to find it easily). The or...

I had to do this today as part of recovering a system from hardware failure. This won't be the last time I'll have to do this, so do...

This is the 3CXPhone profile settings on my wife’s iPhone 4S to connect to her Internode NodePhone account (so I don’t forget it for next ti...

I keep forgetting this, but the old Microsoft Online Speed Test tool that was at http://speedtest.microsoftonline.com/ is no longer active....

Had a few Hyper-V host systems today that after rebooting failed to restart the VMs that were set to auto-restart. No updates had been insta...

If you're getting an installation error code of 0x800F0906 while trying to install .NET Framework 3.5 on a Windows 8 or Windows Server 2...

Microsoft have released an update for Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT that provides support for device-specific RAW formats, allowing you to prev...

Call me old fashioned, but I’d much prefer a patchset than having to install a version control package and suck down a source code check out...

The Microsoft Openness Blog has just announced that the github repository for FreeBSD 8.2 Hyper-V integration components is now live! This...

I needed BWping and HTTPing running on Windows for bandwidth and latency testing of some 3G WAN tails so I compiled them using Cygwin . Th...

Null routes are a useful way to quickly discard packets from an unwanted address or network, especially when you’ve not got immediate or an...

If like me you’re silly enough to lock yourself out of WinRM by removing Kerberos and Negotiate authentication from the WinRM client, you’ll...

Off the back of my previous Windows Server Developer Preview problem I also came across the Microsoft Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool ...

So I fired up a copy on a spare whitebox only to find HTTP and SMB outbound traffic timing out. Bizarrely ping and traceroute were working, ...

I've restored all the blog images now. Did I mention I hate Picasa Albums?

I've broken all but one image reference on the blog :-( Please be patient with me while I resurrect them - somehow Windows Live Writer c...

The DHCP Server MMC Snap-in annoyingly doesn’t have a legend for what the icons mean. Every time I debug a DHCP Server-related issue I’ve fo...

%LOGONSERVER% is a useful environment variable to use in logon scripts to see which DC has serviced your request and can be handy to referen...

Adding new fixed sized VHDs using the Add Virtual Hard Disk Wizard in the Hyper-V console for some reason has stopped working for me on just...

I set up a bunch of symlinks in a share on a Windows Server 2008 R2 install, pointing to a range of different UNC paths. My testing on the s...

A couple of months ago I closed my Facebook account, partly because of the continual privacy abuse by Facebook, but mostly because of what I...

My talented wife started complaining last week that Microsoft Access started continually crashing trying to open databases after performing ...

Just tried installing FreeBSD 8.1 and 8.2 virtual machines on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Core install with the Hyper-V role installed and with...

Occasionally I see Windows Server Backup throw odd errors pointing to problems with the disk allocated to Windows Server Backup, such as the...

If you try and install Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 on a Windows 7 PC with SP1 installed, you’ll get the following erro...

Happy IPocalypse Day – APNIC today were allocated the two remaining /8 networks from IANA . This means that all the free IP addresses have n...

Yes I know that Windows Home Server has Drive Extender. Yes I know that Drive Extender makes adding storage space easy and is a brilliant pi...

Note to self: when compiling 5+ year old code on a 5+ year old operating system, it helps to use a version of GCC that compiles the resultan...

One of the things that annoys me about MMC is the inability to remove column sort orders. In particular I like the default sort order for th...

One of my clients had a bunch of older Pentium 4 PCs that they wanted configured as proxy servers for their branch offices. My Open Source...

One of my clients has some FreeBSD 6.4 installs on hardware that is slowly dying and asked me to virtualise them onto an HP ProLiant ML350 G...