My OpenVPN likes to have difficulty and go yellow from time to time. The problem with this is twofold – I have any and all downloads stop at the absence of VPN, and when I’m not home connecting to my server is more difficult when VPN has hundged up. The simplest fix for now is just to restart/reconnect VPN on the daily.
I use OpenVPN with PIA.
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So much quicker than relying on GUIs in later Windows Server OSes.
Dump it out to a file by ending with > outfile.txt
So far I really like DiskMax (and it’s free as in beer!).
At my POE we use virtual printers for all manner of file production. It’s annoying. What’s more annoying is when it’s time to upgrade a server using virtual printers. Thankfully there’s a way to sorta kinda help the process, by sorta kinda easing the migration process. The following screenshots are from Windows 2012 R2. If you’re using a different Windows OS level your mileage may vary. It’s my understanding that the titles of some of this differs by OS.
I admit it – I use Windows Sticky Notes. I hate how unconfigurable it feels though. The font is terrible, for instance. Lucky you can change it with a reghack.
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REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts] "Segoe Print (TrueType)"="consola.ttf" "Segoe Print Bold (TrueType)"="consolab.ttf" |
What’s happening here is, because the notes demand to use Segoe Print as the font, you’re changing what font Segoe Print actually is. Replace the .ttfs with fonts of your choice.
There are also a myriad of shortcuts for modifying existing note text:
Ctrl+B – Bold text
Ctrl+I – Italic text
Ctrl+T – Strikethrough
Ctrl+U – Underlined text
Ctrl+Shift+L – Bulleted (press once) or Numbered (press twice) list
Ctrl+Shift+> – Increased text size
Ctrl+Shift+< – Decreased text size
Ctrl+A – Select all
Ctrl+Shift+A – Toggles all caps
Ctrl+L – Left aligns text
Ctrl+R – Right aligns text
Ctrl+E – Centers text
Ctrl+Shift+L – Small Alpha list (3rd), Capital Alpha list (4th), small roman (5th), Capital roman (6th)
Ctrl+1 – Single-space lines
Ctrl+2 – Double-space lines
Ctrl+5 – Set 1.5-line spacing
Ctrl+= – Subscript
Ctrl+Shift++ – Superscript
IIS. I’m not a fan. But it’s a requirement where I work, so there you go. Occasionally one of our IIS servers will slow to a crawl or stop responding altogether. Often it’s a application pool run amok. An app pool is essentially a container that holds the processes of a web application. And if your web application isn’t written well, and doesn’t have decent controls in it, it can go nuts. If someone can, say run an open ended database query with the potential to return a bajillion records because your app doesn’t disallow this sort of irresponsible behavior, the app pool containing that process is going to fill. And fill. And fill, eventually gobbling all your processor cycles. An easy way to discern this is if the process w3wp.exe is pegging your CPU at 99%. Find this in Task Manager.
We’ve used a variety of third party tools to monitor Active Directory domain account changes. They’ve all either been expensive or kind of sucked (or, unfortunately, both). But if you’re running a relatively new OS on your controller you can use the magick of Powershell to ship you alerts on account changes! Powershell can monitor the local Security Event Log on your controller and ship you an email when events matching your description are entered. Here’s an example Powershell script:
Tonight was our maintenance window at work, and I updated a bajillion virtual servers. Went OK save for one Windows 2008 r2 box that got stuck in a reboot loop. Updates failed, so I bounced the box to start fresh. It would begin boot, show the dialogs for installing/configuring updates, reach “Configuring Updates: Stage 3 of 3,” and crater. Repeat infinitely. Thankfully the fix was easy. I mounted and booted from the 2008 Server ISO and:
After that it came up fine.
