Category Archives: Microsoft

Network Adapter Priority Windows Server 2008 R2

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What you do is go to Network and Sharing Center and click on the change adapter settings link. From there, if you have the Desktop Experience installed, you might not have the menu bar running across the top. You need to hit the Alt button on your keyboard in order to get the menu bar to show up. From the Advanced menu option, click Advanced Settings.

What will load is a funky little window with your adapters in the top part, and the bindings associated with the adapters on the bottom. For our purposes, you can ignore the bottom part of the window. We are only concerned with the top part.
In the top part you see all of your network adapters. You will also notice two arrows on the right of the selection window. What you are seeing is the adapter connection priority. The highest priority is on the top, running to the lowest priority on the bottom.
All that you need to do to set an adapter with a higher priority is to highlight the adapter, and click the up arrow. That’s it. Simple solution to a difficult problem.

Use Windows 7’s Previous Versions to Go Back in Time and Save Your Files

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Previous Versions is an incredibly useful feature built into Windows 7, which allows the OS to record and view earlier versions of files without a flux capacitor. Here’s a detailed guide to using this excellent feature.

This feature goes beyond the functionality of the Recycle Bin as it allows you to:

Recover files you may have permanently deleted.
View or restore a version of a file which you have saved over.
Allow you to compare current and/or previous versions of a file side by side.

With a little bit of dedicated hard drive space, an automation script and scheduled task, you can leverage this feature to guard against inadvertent file deletions and overwrites which traditional backups may not adequately cover.

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Cleaning up the WINSXS folder in Windows 7 SP1

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Earlier I wrote about the WINSXS directory in Windows Vista and Windows 2008.

In Windows 7 the cleanup tool is changed. Just like it changed with Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista en Windows 2008. :)

The new command is:
DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded

Remember: This command requires elevated command prompt and you cannot uninstall the Service Pack after it completes!

UAC Virtualization – Allowing standard users to update a system protected area

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You should know the score by now – I install application FOO into “C:\Program Files\Foo Inc\Foo” and it has a built-in manifest stating that asInvoker is used for its requested privilege level, allowing standard users to run it.

Attempts by standard users to write to “C:\Program Files\Foo Inc\Foo” do not fail with “access denied” (as they would have on version of Windows prior to Vista), but instead the disk write is redirected to the user’s own profiles (under “%userprofile%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files”).

So far, so good – the application is happy as it believes it is able to write to a system protected area of the volume even when running without admin rights.

 

But imagine that FOO has an “automatic updater” or a “launcher” stub process whose job it is to check the current version of the application and download an update package & apply it…

The write operation is virtualized into the user’s profile, so the new patch will download okay – but when it comes to apply it this is also virtualized and the file it is updating or replacing is not in VirtualStore… so it fails.

Re-run the launcher and it will either start over with the download of the update, or try again to apply it and fail once more.

 

There are now plenty of apps (and games) that will run okay without admin privileges, but they have problems patching because of UAC virtualization unless the launcher was started elevated (or by the Administrator, who is the only user exempt from UAC as per my previous blog entry).

So how to leave UAC enabled and be able to use and update this program as a standard user? Continue reading →

MPIO between Storage Server and clients in a pure Hyper-V environment

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1) open the iSCSI initiator
2) Add the two iSCSI portals (DNS, or IP if there are no name resolution in the private iSCSI network)
3) You will see the available targets in the Targets tab
4) Click connect
5) Check Enable multipath and add the specific target-initiator pair in one of the iSCSI networks ONLY
6) We will add the remaining iSCSI path once MPIO is configured

1) Install the MPIO feature
2) Click MPIO in Administration Tools
3) In the Discover multi-path tab, click add support for iSCSI devices (you must connect to the iSCSI device before otherwise this will be grayed)
4) You will be asked to restart Windows. You will see a new device hardware ID (MSFT2005iSCSIBusType_0x9) in the MPIO Devices tab.

1) Once restarted open the iSCSI initiator again
2) Select the target in the Targets tab, click properties
3) Click Add session and add the target-initiator pair in the remaining iSCSI network
4) Click Devices, you will see only one device (not two) if MPIO is configured properly
5) Click MPIO, you will see the load balancing policy and the two connections to the iSCSI device
6) In Disk Management (or Storage Manager for SANs (SMfS), if Storage Server hardware providers are installed), configure the newly added disks as appropriate

To verify:

1) You will see network traffic in both iSCSI adapters when formatting and copying files
2) Copy a large file. Disconnect one of the iSCSI connections and see the traffic failover to another path. Repeat the other way.
3) In the Device by connection view of Device Manager, you will see “MSFT Virtual HD Multi-Path Disk Device” under the Microsoft Multi-Path Bus Driver
4) In MPIO the Configuration Shapshot tab, generate a configuration log file.

Overscan Options in Catalyst 9.9 on Windows 7

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I had enough trouble finding this option that i felt it worthy of a blog post.

I’m not immediately sure how the Catalyst Control Center differs between Windows 7 and Windows XP, but I was able to find the Overscan/Underscan options a bit easier in XP.

To access the Overscan option of your current display do the following:

  • Right click on the Desktop and open CCC
  • If your not already in Advanced Mode, Switch to this.
  • Click dropdown menu Graphics in the top right
  • Select Desktops and Displays
  • Right Click your currently activated display under ‘Please Select a Display’
  • Select Configure
  • Click on the Scaling Options tab

From this menu you’ll probably find more of your favorite CCC options that you’ve been missing. For reference these instructions come from a Windows 7 machine with a Sapphire ATi Radeon 4850 running Catalyst Control Center 9.9

Automatically add email signatures/disclaimers with Exchange 2010

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For many organizations, it’s a good idea to centrally manage email signatures and email disclaimers – it gives a consistent branding on your email communications, and you’re not relying on end users to set them up correctly and keep them consistent. If you’re running Microsoft Exchange 2010, you have the ability to do this out of the box, using ‘Transport Rules’. Applying signatures this way should also save you space in your mailbox databases, due to the fact that signatures won’t be added on to each message in every users “Sent Items” folder.

Continue reading →

What is the WINSXS directory in Windows 2008 and Windows Vista and why is it so large?

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UPDATE FOR WINDOWS 7 SP1

A commonly asked question among people looking at a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 installation is “why is the WinSxS folder so big?!”   To answer that question I need to first describe componentization, and how components are managed in Windows Vista.

One of the largest changes between previous versions of Windows and Windows Vista was a move from an INF described OS to componentization.  A component in Windows is one or more binaries, a catalog file, and an XML file that describes everything about how the files should be installed. From associated registry keys and services to what kind security permissions the files should have.  Components are grouped into logical units, and these units are used to build the different Windows editions.

All of the components in the operating system are found in the WinSxS folder – in fact we call this location the component store.  Each component has a unique name that includes the version, language, and processor architecture that it was built for.  The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system, all other instances of the files that you see on the system are “projected” by hard linking from the component store.  Let me repeat that last point – there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder.   So looked at from that perspective, the WinSxS folder is really the entirety of the whole OS, referred to as a “flat” in down-level operating systems.  This also accounts for why you will no longer be prompted for media when running operations such as System File Checker (SFC), or when installing additional features and roles. Continue reading →

Maximum size of deployment cache Java Web Start and Java Plug-in

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The deployment.properties file is used for storing and retrieving deployment configuration properties in the Java Control Panel. They are also used for customizing runtime behavior for both Java Plug-in and Java Web Start.

There is always a User-Level deployment.properties file. Its location, which is non-configurable, is described below. There may also be an (optional) System-Level deployment.properties file. If it exists, its location is determined by a System Administrator through the deployment.config file as described below. Continue reading →