Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

We do have access to Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center. So I checked if we have right to download Windows Server 2012. And we do. So I downloaded and installed it. I wanted to Activate it. I went to Action Center // Windows Activation. I clicked button called Activate and I’ve got following error:

Windows Activation error

So I tried to google for an error: 0x8007007B. Nothing similar to my problem was found. I tried to call licence call centrum and they redirected me to support call centrum. After waiting on line to get to technician I checked status of our contract with Microsoft. I found out that all our contracts Expired or Ended. So in short: Error message:”0x8007007B The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.” means you don’t have right to activate Microsoft Windows 2012 Server product 🙂

Thank you Microsoft to make your error messages more and more understable.

Today is a day when Windows Server 2012 was released and it’s available for download. First new feature I wanted to test is Data Deduplication.

Theory

Data Deduplication in Windows Server 2012 is performed as background job, which runs by default every hour. This process runs when server is idle and it doesn’t eat all server’s free resources. One job can run per one volume. It can deduplicate/check 100GB/hour. It does deduplication of variable-sized chunks (32-128KB) of files. Nice picture is on the bottom of this page. By default it deduplicates files which were not accessed for more than 5 days. It doesn’t deduplicate following file types: aac, aif, aiff, asf, asx, au, avi, flac, jpeg, m3u, mid, midi, mov, mp1, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpa, mpe, mpeg, mpeg2, mpeg3, mpg, ogg, qt, qtw, ram, rm, rmi, rmvb, snd, swf, vob, wav, wax, wma, wmv, wvx, accdb, accde, accdr, accdt, docm, docx, dotm, dotx, pptm, potm, potx, ppam, ppsx, pptx, sldx, sldm, thmx, xlsx, xlsm, xltx, xltm, xlsb, xlam, xll, ace, arc, arj, bhx, b2, cab, gz, gzip, hpk, hqx, jar, lha, lzh, lzx, pak, pit, rar, sea, sit, sqz, tgz, uu, uue, z, zip, zoo.

Let’s play

This feature is not enabled by default. You need to enable it by wizard Add Roles and Features:

Adding Data Deduplication feature

When this is done you can use all Data Deduplication Powershell Cmdlets. To use these cmdlets you need to run Powershell as Administrator :-).

Microsoft engineers gave us one tool DDPEVAL.exe which can do little check data on our drives and tell us expected deduplication savings. You can copy utility DDPEVAL.exe to other system and run it to check deduplication expected ratio before even trying deduplication.

Read more…

Today I installed final version of Windows Server 2012 and I noticed new copy window which looks very nice:

New Windows Server 2012 copy window

I hope Metro look have more than that 🙂

Once upon the time I was at one campus and I wanted to do presentation. When I they gave me IP address of projector I wanted to use, I started to wonder how to connect to it 🙂 Now I know, Windows 7 has utility to do so. It’s called netproj.exe. You run it, enter IP/host name, password and you are connected. Really nice to know 🙂

Today Microsoft released great utility to check health of Active Directory Replication in your environment.

More information about utility is HERE.

I tested it and it’s nice tool to check vitality. You don’t have to use command line utilities.

Just check it and you’ll love it 🙂

Today my ex-colleague called me that Windows 2000 Active Directory domain, he is taking care of, is not fully functional. He mentioned that “primary” domain controller is dead and now domain has some problems.

I had to seize all FSMO roles to live Domain Controller using ntdsutils as mentioned at this Microsoft article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255504

I manually deleted dead domain controller’s information from Active Directory using following Microsoft article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216498

After checking events I found out that there was also Certification Authority on dead domain controller and I needed to clean up all Enterprise Domain Certification Autorhority information from Active Directory Domain using following Microsoft article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555151

PS: Don’t forget to put your account into all “administrative” groups: Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins and Schem Admins.

Today again I was pissed off from Windows Updates. I installed Windows 2008 R2 server and I started to download and install all Windows updates. I didn’t watch it, because, as always, I trusted it. But when I looked at it after couple minutes I found out following screen:

Internet Explorer installation under Windows Update window

Windows Updates was installed IE 9.0 and window of IE 9.0 installation was under Windows Updates window. So I thought my computer is working as hard as it can and it was hiding windows from me to get some rest 🙂 When I clicked on hidden window I needed to confirm the installation:

IE 9.0 hidden confirmation window

This was not the first (but I hope it was last) time Windows Updates did it to me. 🙂

Sometimes you need to have a overview what happened on OS couple days/weeks/monts ago. Before I knew there is some utility I would look into events and look for some problem ones.

Now I know there is a utility in Windows Vista and higher which is called Reliability Monitor which records all major changes/errors on OS. You can run it from Start Menu typying “Reliabi..” and you will find:

Reliability Monitor

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If you want to list all encrypted files by EFS you can use command:

cipher [PATH]

This command will list all files in PATH. Encrypted files will have “E” character in front of it:

List encrypted files

This command is great to handle encrypted files. Look at cipher /? command output.

I found great utility builtin Windows Vista and higher. It’s called Problem Steps Recorder. It’s mentioned to use it by users to record their problems and then send recorded screens to Helpdesk/Administrator.

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