Category for various tips and tricks
One of my hosted lab environments ran into series of issues, and after unplanned maintenance there were multiple problems to resolve. The below error with a faulting ntdll.dll module was something I recall seeing many years ago with a Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) deployment where the MOM agent simply would not start. On every single attempt to start the service it would crash with the erro… Read the rest “Faulting Module Name NTdll.dll”
The default option for DNS resolution on an Azure virtual network is to use the Azure DNS service. This is perfectly fine for regular Internet requests, if you need the capability to register internal DNS records for Active Directory then you will typically need to run your own DNS service. This is the case here and is also something observed with multiple customers. In each of these cases the … Read the rest “Intermittent Azure DNS Resolution Issues With With New Domain Controller”
Now that multiple services have stopped supporting IE11 coupled with the end of support for legacy Edge, it is imperative that we transition to an updated browser on all of our devices. IE11 is already unsupported for multiple Microsoft services, and the list will grow over time. For example Microsoft Teams support ceased on the 30th November 2020, and overall Microsoft 365 support ends on the 17t… Read the rest “QuickTip – Removing IE11 Via Command Line”
The below post initially stemmed from an Exchange Risk Assessment which noted that all of the customer's Exchange servers were missing critical Windows updates. The customer's security team were slightly upset as they believed (mistakenly) that all assets were properly updated. This was not the case. When we looked into the details, the monthly Windows Server 2012 R2 updates had been failing to… Read the rest “Unable to Install Windows Updates or Windows Components”
When you try to install a PowerShell module or connect to the PowerShell Repository you may get the below error messages:
WARNING: Unable to download from URI 'https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=627338&clcid=0x409' to ''.
WARNING: Unable to download the list of available providers. Check your internet connection.
For make most glorious benefit engine of search:
PackageManagement\Install-Packag… Read the rest “Unable To Install PowerShell Modules – Unable To Download From URI Error”
One of the benefits of Windows as a service is that we receive constant updates, security enhancements and additions to the OS. One of the new features in the 2004 build was the introduction of hardware accelerated GPU scheduling. For details on this new feature and some background on how the Windows Display Driver Model has evolved please read this excellent article.
In this post I will post my … Read the rest “Microsoft Teams High CPU – Using Hardware Acceleration with the Microsoft Teams Client To Lower CPU Load”
Exchange 2013 introduced the Managed Availability feature, so Exchange can self monitor and perform recovery actions upon itself. While this has greatly helped Exchange become more self-healing, one of the downsides is that there is no real UI for Managed Availability. The only UI is the Managed Availability Event Logs. All of the configuration inside of Exchange is done using PowerShell. The … Read the rest “QuickTip – Which Managed Availability Components Are Unhealthy?”
One of the great things at Microsoft is the interaction with very smart colleagues. A question was posed regarding DNS. Most admins will know that DNS uses port 53, but is that TCP or UDP?
The answer is Consultant’s answer #1 "It depends"…
From a client resolver perspective this old TechNet documents:
During DNS resolution, DNS messages are sent from DNS clients to DNS servers or between DNS servers… Read the rest “How To Set NSLookup to Use TCP”
Well, finally we are back online! It's been a long sorry saga over the last couple of years for the MSDN and TechNet blog platforms. In some ways this is not a new phenomena for bloggers at Microsoft. Things have not always been easy. Initially the culture was not so open and allowed staff to share externally. Really, it was not all that long ago when FTEs were able to sign up and create a blog… Read the rest “Back In Business”
To remove duplicates using PowerShell is exceedingly straightfroward. However, I have a habit of forgetting the cmdlet so parking this here for future reference.
For example, we can use the Get-Unique cmdlet or Select-Object -Unique parameter.
As a simple example:
The Get-Unique cmdlet compares each item in a sorted list to the next item, eliminates duplicates, and returns only… Read the rest “Quick Tip – Get Unique Instances In PowerShell”