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Archive for category Windows

Enterprise Root CA Web Enrollment – RTFM, but what if I didn’t?

Mar 1

Posted by Bhargav in Windows Server | No Comments

I was building Enterprise Root CA in my lab and was in rush so ofcourse, I did not read the fabulous manual and went forward with installing the Enterprise Root CA without installing IIS. I did know IIS is needed for web enrollment but did not care to check if it was already installed. It sure wasn’t.

So the Root CA was installed but I could not request certificates using web enrollment.

I went ahead and installed IIS and enabled ASP after the fact but web enrollment still wasn’t going to work as the virtual directories for web enrollment were missing as expected. Only if I had read RTFM.

What can I do now? How big of an issue this is going to be for me? luckily not any bigger than issuing a command “certutil –vroot”. As long as IIS was installed correctly, the command creates necessary, checks if ASP is enabled and warns you if not. That’s it for fixing the problem I created for myself. Thanks fabulous programmers at Microsoft to make products work for those who don’t read the fabulous manuals without real headache of reinstall.

Off to my next task…

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How to prepare USB media for Windows 7 installation

Nov 9

Posted by Bhargav in Windows 7 | No Comments

I have blogged earlier about creating a USB media for Windows 7 Installation. I recently found out, there is a better way!

Microsoft Store guys have Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool which makes creating USB media for installation easy.

The first step is to download and install the tool.

Once you do that, launch the tool and select source ISO file. Click next:

win7usb1

Next, select “USB Device” in media type:

win7usb2

In Step 3, select appropriate USB device from the list and click “Begin Copying”. Make sure your USB drive is empty or you have back up of data contained on the USB device:

win7usb3

Confirm erase operation. When you click “Erase USB Device”, it will format the device before copying the files to it. You should see the progress window while it copies the files to USB device for you:

win7usb4

Once the process completes, remove the USB, insert it on the computer where you need to install Windows 7 and start the computer. Make sure your BIOS can boot from USB devices and you select appropriate USB device that contains installation files when it boots.

You can find more details about this tool at Microsoft Store web site.

This process should work for Windows Server 2008 R2 as well.

Enjoy!

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Install Windows 7 from Bootable USB Drive

Aug 19

Posted by Bhargav in Windows 7 | No Comments

If you ever wondered how can you make your Windows 7 installation process faster or more convenient (in my case convenient as I don’t have a DVD drive in my laptop, I replaced it with extra HDD), you will be happy to know that it is possible to install Windows 7 from a bootable USB key.

Cesar has documented the process here.

I would like to add to the process documented above. In my experience, I did not have to do Step 1 mentioned above. I decided to skip it and see how it worked. I had a working USB key so I just removed all contents and performed Steps 2, 3 and 4.

I have been using this process since release of Windows 7 Beta so I had to do step 2 only once. Every time I got new build, I just removed all files and replaced from new DVD ISO.

Also, since I don’t have DVD drive, you may be wondering how did I copy files from DVD to USB. Well, I just mounted the ISO using Slysoft Virtual CloneDrive. There are many tools available to mount ISO files. Feel free to use one that best suits your needs. I settled on Virtual CloneDrive as it was the only one that worked on Windows 7 x64.

If you have installed Windows 7 Beta or RC, it’s time to upgrade to RTM. If not, what are you waiting for?

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Exctrlst.exe – The case of missing Performance Coutners

Jun 22

Posted by Bhargav in Windows Server | No Comments

Recently I wrote about how to fix Corrupt of Missing Performance Coutners on a Windows Server. If you read the KB Article mentioned, it may sound complicated. One of the steps is to go through registry and find all services that have performance subkey. This could be very time consuming and tedious.

Also, if you missed, the article does mention you have to make sure you rebuild counters from other programs such as Exchange Server and SQL server among others. It’s not part of rebuild process outlined in the KB.

So, I went digging for gold and found Exctrlst.exe. If you run the exe, it will bring up the UI and displays all registry-based performance counters installed on the system. There is a neat option in the UI. The check box “Performance Counter Enabled” allows you to see if you have any performance counters that are not loaded. The UI is not very helpful in making user aware that you can just click the checkbox if the counters are not loaded and it will load it for you. There are no “OK” or “Apply” buttons and change is instant.

There may be services that does not immediately reflect this and you may have to unload/reload counters but I will let you figure out how to do that. Most of the counters should load immediately and you should be able to report on them using Performance Monitor.

For those who need to see the gold I dug up, follow me.

P.S.: I have read some posts which confirms this will also work with Windows Server 2008. Don’t take it as my word, but you have one more reason to experiment.

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Corrupt or Missing Performance Counters

Jun 12

Posted by Bhargav in PowerShell, Windows Server | No Comments

One of the functions in the code I posted in “Check Exchange 2003 vitals with PowerShell” is to check performance counters. When running the script, you may encounter an error:

Get-WmiObject : Invalid Class

 

This could happen for 2 reasons:

1: You have a typo in Perf Counter object.

2: The performance counter is missing on the host you are checking.

 

When this happened to me, I checked and verified this by loading performance monitor on affected server and trying to load Memory counters which the code was checking for. To no surprise, I found that the server did not have Memory object.

There are many reasons why the performance object could go missing from the OS. The KB article “How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values” explains how you can resolve this problem and bring the missing performance counter objects back.

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What information do you collect anyway (Microsoft Privacy Policy)

Jan 27

Posted by Bhargav in Vista, Windows Server | No Comments

As I was browsing away, my IE crashed. Vista then asked me if I wanted to send collected data to Microsoft. I said yes.

This is when I started thinking what information is being collected from my computer and how is it used. A quick search resulted in a pleasant surprise.

The surprise was how much information is published about each feature of Vista, what information it collects, processes and transmits. How the information is used by Microsoft and what choices users have.

If you are an Enterprise administrator and ask, forget Vista, tell me how do I control communications from my Windows Server 2008 machines. What features of Windows Server 2008 communicate to Internet and how the information flows? What ports do they use? What if I want to prevent Windows Server 2008 from communicating over Internet to satisfy my organization’s security requirements?

Well, I am glad to inform Microsoft has provided detailed documentation on this as well. you can access it here.

I like it the way the documentation is clearly defining each component and how it communicates back to company servers, information collected and choices users are provided with. I have yet to find such details from other vendors.

I don’t believe anyone reading this post would not care about privacy policy. For those who don’t, I would let you read the quote below.

Quote of the day:
An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out. – Will Rogers

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