Category for various tips and tricks
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”
In current versions of Windows the venerable snipping tool (snippingtool.exe) has been updated with improved functionality.
This is the Snipping Tool from a Windows 7 lab machine:
Clicking on Options we see:
The below were taken from my Windows 10 build 1803 machine. Note that there are now additional buttons present.
Specifically the Mode and Delay b… Read the rest “QuickTip–Delay Functionality In Windows Snipping Tool”
Since today is World Emoji Day, the below tip is rather relevant!
Did you know that Windows now has a keyboard shortcut built in to allow to access emojis?
Windows key and period / full stop *
or
Windows key and colon
This will function across multiple applications and is not limited to Skype for Business. Enjoy!!
Cheers,
Rhoderick
* – choose whiche… Read the rest “QuickTip – Windows Emoji Keyboard Shortcut”
This post will attempt to resolve some download frustration if your are looking for an older version of the .NET Framework. This is an issue with Exchange 2010 as the initial .NET framework for that platform has not been updated, whereas .NET Framework support in Exchange 2013 and 2016 now leverage newer versions of .NET framework, at the time of writing 4.6.2 and 4.7.1 are supported for Exchang… Read the rest “Quick Tip – Download .NET Framework 4.5 Offline Installer”
This tip is for all the folks out there who want a quick and easy way to open an additional instance of an application which they are running or to elevate an application.
The below tips were captured from a Windows 10 build 1709 machine.
The below should work for most applications – if you find one that does not, please leave a comment.
In this example we have a cmd prompt o… Read the rest “Quick Tip–How To Easily Open Additional Instance or Elevate Applications”
Having to manually open a blank MMC and add in the certificate MMC every time will quickly bore you. I used to then save it onto my desktop as shown below so I would only have to do this once per server. It could also be copied to other servers. The chosen name goes back to TechEd 2002 – don’t ask…
While that is useful for servers you commonly use, what about other servers? What if you work wit… Read the rest “Quick Tip–Easily Accessing Certificate MMC”
When building out a lab, you might need to attach the same ISO to multiple VMs. In this case I was installing multiple Exchange 2016 severs, and wanted to easily add the same ISO file to each of the VMs.
This was on my Windows 10 laptop which makes quick work of the task since we can use PowerShell.
The VMs to target all have the same naming convention. The VMs for the Exchange 2016 lab start with… Read the rest “Quick Tip–Adding Same ISO DVD Image To All Hyper-V Lab VMs”
This is one of those little things that make life much, much easier. Imagine the scenario; you go to eject a USB disk drive or USB flash and Windows tells you that it is still in use. How to track down which application is using the drive?
In the below example, the USB flash drive E: will be ejected. Or at least, we will try...
Alas, no! There is a problem ejecting the USB mas… Read the rest “Quick Tip Windows 10 – Unable To Stop Device Notification”