The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,862 other subscribers

Archive for the ‘Windows Server 2012’ Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Windows 10 auto-logout on <5 minutes of inactivity – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/26

This seems to work on other Windows versions as well: [WayBack] Windows 10 auto-logout on <5 minutes of inactivity – Super User

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a Comment »

Finding out when your domain password will expire :: Active Directory :: Admin Tips :: Windows 7 :: Windows Server 2012/2008/2003/2000/XP/NT Administrator Knowledge Base :: KBase Tips :: WindowsNetworking.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2018/02/02

Here’s how you can find out when your domain password will expire.

net user %USERNAME% /domain

It figures this out for the current logon domain (so it doesn’t work cross-domain) but it is a great help, especially when filtering out just the password information:

net user %USERNAME% /domain | findstr "Password"

This can be done in a more complex way with dsquery or adinfo that are tools to query

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Consolidating NTFS free space

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/29

For shrinking VM disk images, it’s important to consolidate NTFS free space towards the end of the this.

I’ve tried many tools, starting with defrag C: /X (which tries, but doesn’t give good results) and found out these steps give the best results:

  1. Perform an Ultradefrag full optimisation,
  2. Perform a MyDefrag Consolidate free space script on the drive.

If shrinking still fails then:

  1. Try the Ultradefrag at boot time
  2. Verify what kind of file(s) prevent shrinking: they show up in red after the MyDefrag session:
    1. Zoom in them (they can initially as small as 1 red pixel) by clicking on or near them, repeating the zoom long enough so you can hover over with the mouse and the lower part of the screen shows a filename like  where you cannot find much information about “$badclus:$bad:$data” but appear to be clusters marked as bad on NTFS level using something like chkdsk /B.
    2. If it was a bad sector like above, then try to resolve it with [WayBack] ntfsfix which ships with GParted live boot:
      1. boot a [WayBack] GParted — Live CD/USB/PXE/HD drive,
      2. run GParted to see the drive path (for instance /dev/sda1)
      3. start a terminal
      4. run this command:
        ntfsfix -b /dev/sda1
        which will give output like this:

        Mounting volume... OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Checking the alternate boot sector... OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
Going to un-mark the bad clusters ($BadClus)... OK
NTFS partition /dev/sda1 was processed successfully.
      5. boot back into Windows
      6. on an administrative command prompt run this for the affected drive letter:
        chkdsk D: /B
        (reboot if needed)
  3. Shrink the drive using diskmgmt.msc

If you still cannot shrink, then try [WayBack] http://ftp.raxco.com/pub/download/pd14.0/pd14.0_pro.exe PerfectDisk by Raxco free trial.

Note:

MyDefrag (formerly named JkDefrag) is not maintained any more but the 4.3.1 version in the WayBack machine still works very well as the underlying defragmentation APIs in Windows haven’t changed.

References:

For FAT32:

For GParted / ntfsfix:

PerfectDisk via:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista | Leave a Comment »

Task Scheduler – command-line End a Running Task

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/12/11

schtasks /End [/S <system> [/U <username> [/P [<password>]]]] /TN taskname

[WayBack] End a Running Task

Every now and then you have those Scheduled Tasks consisting of batch files that – despite trying – still ask for user input.

If – even after a reasonable time out – the Task Scheduler still hasn’t killed them, you can kill them by hand with the above schtasks in a snap.

–jeroen

Posted in Console (command prompt window), Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a Comment »

Can I invoke Windows Update from the command line? – Super User

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/09/25

For my link archive: Can I invoke Windows Update from the command line? – Super User [WayBack]

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

The Most Common VPN Error Codes Explained

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/26

Source: The Most Common VPN Error Codes Explained

  1. VPN Error 800 “Unable to establish connection”
  2. VPN Error 619 “A connection to the remote computer could not be established”
  3. VPN Error 51 “Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem”
  4. VPN Error 412 “The remote peer is no longer responding”
  5. VPN Error 721 “The remote computer did not respond”
  6. VPN Error 720 “No PPP control protocols configured”
  7. VPN Error 691 “Access denied because username and/or password is invalid on the domain”
  8. VPN Errors 812, 732 and 734 “The connection was prevented because of a policy configured on your RAS/VPN server”
  9. VPN Error 806 “A connection between your computer and the VPN server has been established but the VPN connection cannot be completed.”

–jeroen

via: Could be useful. – Joe C. Hecht – Google+

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

VHD Attach 4.11 – Medo’s Home Page

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/06/05

Brilliant:

This is small tool that adds Attach and Detach option to contextual (aka right-click) menu of Virtual disk (vhd) files. That enables those operations to be done without trip to Disk Management console. Detach option is available on hard drive contextual menu also (if selected in options).

Source:

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 | Leave a Comment »

17 years ago, C:\nul\nul crashed/BSOD Windows; now $MFT does for Windows < 10

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/26

Source:

History repeating itself: [Archive.is] 31607 – C:\nul\nul crashes/BSOD then, now it’s this:

Via:

All versions prior to Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 seem vulnerable.

So add $MFT to this list:

The following device names have been known to render a system unstable: CON,
NUL, AUX, PRN, CLOCK$, COMx, LPT1, and CONFIG$.

Oh BTW: history repeated itself this year too. With NUL

In short, Steven Sheldon created a rust package named nul which broke the complete package manager on Windows:

BTW: one of my gripes on learning new languages is that they come with a whole new idiom of their ecosystem: rust, cargo, crates, all sound like being a truck mechanic to me.

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Microsoft Surface on Windows 7, NTFS, Power User, Security, Software Development, The Old New Thing, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Defender, Windows Development, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Two Quick Methods for Finding Shared Folders in Windows

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/05/01

In addition to the two methods mentioned at Two Quick Methods for Finding Shared Folders in Windows (use net share or compmgmt.msc) I like this one:

fsmgmt.msc

It directly gets you to the “Shared Folders” inside compmgmt.msc

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

Reducing the size of your Windows.edb (Search) and DataStore.edb (Update) databases

Posted by jpluimers on 2017/01/30

Windows Search: Windows.edb

If you use Windows Search (I don’t: I use Everything by VoidTools), your Windows.edb can grow ridiculously large. It is a single file, though it appears to be in two places because there is a symbolic link from C:\Users\All Users to C:\ProgramData :

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb

This is how to reduce its size:

How to offline defrag the index

  1. Change the Windows Search service so that it does not automatically start. To do this, run the following command in cmd.exe: 
    sc config wsearch start= disabled
  2. Run the following command to stop the Windows Search service: 
    net stop wsearch
  3. Run the following command to perform offline compaction of the Windows.edb file: 
    esentutl.exe /d %AllUsersProfile%\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
  4. Run the following command to change the Windows Search service to delayed start: 
    sc config wsearch start= delayed-auto
  5. Run the following command to start the service: 
    net start wsearch

Notes:

  1. I did not perform the last 2 steps as I’ve kept Windows Search disabled.
  2. If you want to reduce the size of the C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Projects\SystemIndex\Indexer\CiFiles\ directory:
    1. Before step 1, choose what kind of Windows Search indexing options you want
    2. Between step 3 and 4, delete the directory

Windows Update: DataStore.edb

Windows Update uses the same database structure and is a single file:

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb

This is how I reduced its size:

net stop wuauserv
net stop bits
esentutl.exe /d C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\DataStore.edb
net start bits
net start wuauserv

Talking about Windows Update: you might also want to Clean Up the WinSxS Folder

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Everything by VoidTools, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 9, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Vista | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »