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Last month, I wrote about a very annoying issue, that I discovered during a Windows 10 VDI deployment: Roaming of the AppData\Local folder breaks the Start Menu of Windows 10 Enterprise (Roaming of AppData\Local breaks Windows 10 Start Menu). During research, I stumbled over dozens of threads about this issue.

Today, after hours and hours of testing, troubleshooting and reading, I might have found a solution.

The environment

Currently I don’t know if this is a workaround, a weird hack, or no solution at all. Maybe it was luck that none of my 2074203423 logins at different linked-clones resulted in a broken start menu. The customer is running:

Disclaimer: The information from this blog post is provided on an “AS IS” basis, without warranties, both express and implied.

Last week, I had an interesting discussion with a customer. Some months back, the customer has decided to kick-off a PoC for a VMware Horizon View based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). He is currently using fat-clients with Windows 8.1, and the new environment should run on Windows 10 Enterprise. Last week, we discussed the idea of using Windows Server 2012 R2 as desktop OS.

When dealing with Microsoft Exchange restore requests, you will come across three different restore situations:

• a database
• a single mailbox
• a single mailbox item (mail, calendar entry etc.)

Restoring a complete database is not a complicated task, but restoring a single mailbox, or a single mailbox item, is. First, you need to restore the mailbox, that includes the desired mailbox, into a recovery database. Then you can restore the mailbox, or the mailbox items, from the recovery database. Some of the tasks can only be done with the Exchange Management Shell.

Today, this tweet caught my attention.

Windows Patching As You Know It Is Dead https://t.co/X3y6rkspUY via @xenappblog

— Trond Eirik Haavarstein (@xenappblog) June 28, 2017

Patch management is currently a hot topic, primarily because of the latest ransomware attacks.

After appearance of WannaCry, one of my older blog posts got unfamiliar attention: WSUS on Windows 2012 (R2) and KB3159706 – WSUS console fails to connect. Why? My guess: Many admins started updating their Windows servers after appearance of WannaCry. Nearly a year after Microsoft has published KB3159706, their WSUS servers ran into this issue.

One of my customers has started a project to create a Windows 10 Enterprise (LTSB 2016) master for their VMware Horizon View environment. Beside the fact (okay, it is more a personal feeling), that Windows 10 is a real PITA for VDI, I noticed an interesting issue during tests.

The issue

For convenience, I adopted some settings of the current Persona Management GPO for Windows 7 for the new Windows 10 environment. During the tests, the customer and I noticed a strange behaviour: After login, the start menu won’t open. The only solution was to logoff and delete the persona folder (most folders are redirected using native Folder Redirections, not the redirection feature of the View Persona Management). While debugging this issue, I found this error in the eventlog.

While searching for a simple monitoring für my root servers, I’m stumbled over a python-based software called Simplemonitor. Other alternatives, like Nagios, or forks like Incinga etc., were a bit too much for my needs.

What is SimpleMonitor?

SimpleMonitor is a Python script which monitors hosts and network connectivity. It is designed to be quick and easy to set up and lacks complex features that can make things like Nagios, OpenNMS and Zenoss overkill for a small business or home network. Remote monitor instances can send their results back to a central location.

I don’t like to use untrusted networks. When I have to use such a network, e.g. an open WiFi network, I use a TLS encrypted tunnel connection to encrypt all web traffic that travels through the untrusted network. I’m using a simple stunnel/ Squid setup for this. My setup consists of three components:

• Stunnel (server mode)
• Squid proxy
• Stunnel (client mode)

What is stunnel?

Stunnel is an OSS project that uses OpenSSL to encrypt traffic. The website describes Stunnel as follows:

I switched my mobile carrier and my new carrier doesn’t offer multi SIM (but hey, it’s cheap and sufficient for my needs). Now I have to use my iPhone as WiFi hotspot. No big deal, works perfect. Except one thing: When I was using the built-in 4G modem in my laptop, Windows 10 knew that it was using a mobile (metered) connection, and suspended some services like OneDrive sync, download of Windows Updates etc. That is pretty handy in times of “flatrates” with single digit GB highspeed data volume.

TL;DR: There’s a script at the bottom of the page that fixes the issue.

Some days ago, this HPE customer advisory caught my attention:

Advisory: (Revision) VMware - HPE ProLiant Gen8 Servers running VMware ESXi 5.5 Patch 10, VMware ESXi 6.0 Patch 4, Or VMware ESXi 6.5 May Experience Purple Screen Of Death (PSOD): LINT1 Motherboard Interrupt

And there is also a corrosponding VMware KB article:

ESXi host fails with intermittent NMI PSOD on HP ProLiant Gen8 servers

Today, I had a very interesting discussion. As part of an ongoing troubleshooting process, console screenshots of virtual machines should be created.

The colleagues, who were working on the problem, already found a PowerCLI script that was able to create screenshots using the Managed Object Reference (MoRef). But unfortunately all they got were black screens and/ or login prompts. Latter were the reason why they were unable to run the script unattended. They used the Get-VMScreenshot script, which was written by Martin Pugh.