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All posts for the month November, 2012

Startup items are not enabled on this system

Posted by Ryan Grisham on November 28, 2012
Posted in: Server 2012. 2 comments

So I went to remove a program from startup today on a Server 2012 machine and typed in msconfig like I always have and received this error “Startup items are not enabled on this system.” In Windows 8 you can use task manager but not true with 2012. my googling has been unsuccessful so far. I know you can use a third party tool or edit the registry directly.

 

You can also check these folders: %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and folder %ProgramData%Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp

Here is the sysinternals tool.

I’ll post back if I find a better solution. “not enabled” leads me to believe you can enable it…

 

Reply All: Curbing non-critical use

Posted by Jesse Paxson on November 26, 2012
Posted in: Exchange 2010. Leave a Comment

At RANDA, like many other organizations, we experienced the dreaded flurry of “Reply All” emails after someone sent an email to a Distribution Group that contained all users. We did not want to restrict access to the distribution group, but needed a solution to stop the onslaught of “Thanks”, “Awesome”, “Insert crude joke here”, etc.

To that end, we implemented a couple of Transport Rules that would strip out the distribution group from the To and CC field and add it to the BCC field. This created a system that would allow Reply All on other groups, but eliminate it on the company wide group. If the user clicks Reply All, the reply only goes to the originating user!

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Remote Group Policy Update

Posted by Jesse Paxson on November 21, 2012
Posted in: Powershell. Leave a Comment

So with the introduction of Server 2012, we now have the option of remote Group Policy updates! This can be accomplished using the Group Policy Management Console – Right click on an OU and choose “Group Policy Update…”. However, this method creates a scheduled task for the update that is set to run at a random time within 10 minutes. We need something a bit more immediate and fine grained!

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Poll WMI Service

Posted by Jesse Paxson on November 21, 2012
Posted in: Powershell. Leave a Comment

We recently encountered a situation where our monitoring server failed to report a critical event for a production server. We found that the issue was caused by the WMI service being in a hung state. Had the service been in a failed state, the monitor would have alerted us to that fact and we would have acted accordingly. This created a need to monitor the WMI service for these rare cases. The below script was my solution to this. I’m sure there are many areas of improvement to be made, for right now it works!

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Replicate DC’s

Posted by Jesse Paxson on November 21, 2012
Posted in: Batch. Leave a Comment

I’ll admit it, I’m not very patient when it comes to DC Replication. When I make a change, I need instant gratification… and I got sick of waiting for the “Active Directory Sites and Services” console to open. To that end, I wrote a script that would take care of my need for speed!

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AppFabric Cluster on Windows Server 2012

Posted by Ryan Grisham on November 20, 2012
Posted in: IIS, Server 2012. Tagged: . 3 comments

According to this MSDN Blog Post AppFabric is now supported on Server 2012. However I have been unable to create a clustered cache on the standard edition of 2012. I found the following in the event log:

“The High Availability feature of AppFabric Server caching features requires all nodes in the cache cluster to be running Windows Server Enterprise Edition or higher”

That makes perfect sense for Server 2008r2 considering you can’t do any clustering without Enterprise edition, however things have changed with server 2012. According to Microsoft:

“Standard edition now offers all of the same enterprise-class features as Datacenter and is differentiated only by virtualization rights.”

I have commented on the MSDN blog without luck…

UPDATE:

Microsoft has finally released a patch to address this issue. The patch can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2800726