Author: John

How to Configure the Management IP of a Palo Alto Firewall through a console connection

So I’ve recently started experimenting with a Palo Alto VM Firewall that we are about to trial.  Unfortunately they don’t offer a Hyper-V virtual machine so I’ve had to stick this into dev our ESXi host. After importing the .ovf, I edited the network adapters onto the right VLANs for me to get it going … Continue reading "How to Configure the Management IP of a Palo Alto Firewall through a console connection"

Delete Windows.old from an upgraded Windows Server install operating in Core

I was at a customer site and they had a single Hyper-V host (running Server Hyper-V edition) and had done an in-place upgrade. Microsoft generally recommends you always do fresh installations and migrate, except for Configuration Manager servers where it is a supported configuration to upgrade Windows versions.  They were starting to run low on … Continue reading "Delete Windows.old from an upgraded Windows Server install operating in Core"

How to Reset a Domain Controller’s Domain Admin password for a Virtual Machine running up in Azure

The Reset password utility for Virtual Machines has come in handy on the odd occasion when we never recorded or misplaced the password for a VM running in Azure. The downside is this tool does not support running against Domain Controllers (to reset the in-built Administrator account).  So what happens when you have a domain … Continue reading "How to Reset a Domain Controller’s Domain Admin password for a Virtual Machine running up in Azure"

Reset the Default Domain and Domain Controller Group Policy Objects to their out of box state

So, I recently inherited a small client with SBS 2011 and their previous IT admin only ever used the Default Domain Policy to apply computer and users settings (such as mapped drives and printers). Microsoft has quite a strong recommendation of best practice for the two policies which goes along the lines of; Default Domain … Continue reading "Reset the Default Domain and Domain Controller Group Policy Objects to their out of box state"

How to easily Check your SPN and Delegation settings for SQL Server in an Active Directory environment

I was recently setting up some Linked SQL Servers for a customer to perform queries against a database on one server through another. One of the things you need to get right when setting up linked servers when using Service accounts in Active Directory is SPNs (or Service Principal Names) and Authority to Delegate (for … Continue reading "How to easily Check your SPN and Delegation settings for SQL Server in an Active Directory environment"

Fixing the randomly stopping WsusPool IIS Application pool and Windows Updates failed 0x80244022 error

I was recently assisting a client with an upgrade of their Configuration Manager (SCCM) environment up to the latest release of 1702 and as part of that we’re also going over it’s currently deployed functionality and making sure it all works. They recently noted that clients were no longer receiving updates and ran the Software … Continue reading "Fixing the randomly stopping WsusPool IIS Application pool and Windows Updates failed 0x80244022 error"

An error has occurred when trying to access IdpInitiatedSignOn.aspx to test SAML authentication on AD FS 4.0 (Windows Server 2016)

So usually one of the first things I do after initially setting up an AD FS environment (among others) is to test the Metadata (navigate to https://your.adfs.server/ federationmetadata/2007-06/federationmetadata.xml which should return valid XML) and sign-in functionality using the IdpInitiatedSignOn.aspx method. For Server 2012/2012 R2 this page enabled by default but if we navigate to this … Continue reading "An error has occurred when trying to access IdpInitiatedSignOn.aspx to test SAML authentication on AD FS 4.0 (Windows Server 2016)"