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WSL Installation Step-by-Step
WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is a very useful way of being able to use Linux tools on a Windows system, making it simple to get a proper, working Linux shell up and running. Now WSL2 makes it a lot faster, having an actual full Linux kernel running.
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Fixing Broken Redirected Folders
Redirected folders are a blessing, when they work smoothly and result in thousands of otherwise-unprotected folders being stored on a safe server, backed up and available if a PC fails. They can also be an infuriating mess when they go wrong. I recently tested a new redirected folders setup using a GPO and fresh fileserver.…
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Timeout Failure – Veeam Backup Agent
I had a Veeam Agent backup running regularly and successfully. The agent server is a simple Windows Server 2016 file server. One day recently, the backup job simply stopped working. When I manually ran the job, it started OK, it got as far as “Required backup infrastructure resources have been assigned” being green-ticked, and then…
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Extremely Slow Windows Server with ReFS
I have recently built a server, simply to use as a large (100 TB) iSCSI host. A low-end but still a Xeon 6-core CPU, 8 GB RAM, and a caching RAID controller driving two arrarys, a couple of boot SSDs in RAID-1 and a RAID-6 data array across 16 SATA disks. This is a decent…
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P2V of Remote Desktop Server – Fixing Terminal Services
I have recently done a lot of P2V and V2V work, and have found many things that need tweaks – this one wasn’t well covered by anything I found by Googling, so I thought I’d better document it.
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OpenVPN User with New Phone, How to Reset Google Authenticator
We have a pretty standard OpenVPN setup for some of our users. One of them just got a new phone, and although the trasfer brought over his Google Authenticator app and the code still shows, it no longer works with OpenVPN. This article explains how to resolve this.
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Exchange Server Information
This information is mostly available elsewhere, but I have done some Exchange upgrades and migrations recently and found it useful to pull it all together into a single page for reference.
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Merging and Deleting a Differencing Disk in Hyper-V
Differencing disks do have their uses, as I see it a more permanent snapshot of just the disk. Recently I needed to merge it back into a normal virtual disk. It took a bit of digging, as deleting the differencing disk is not as simple as you might imagine.
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How to Fully Reset an NTFS Filesystem
I’ve recently needed to reorganise a very large (>3.5 TB), very complex (millions of folders, tens of millions of files) NTFS filesystem which had been allowed to evolve slowly over the years into a great big mess. Share permissions were a little too liberal, so users of varying technical competence had run riot – applying…
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25 Years of DOOM
25 years ago, in late 1993, something happened which changed the world – Doom was released by Id Software. Here I’ll explain why I feel this was a really important step for the PC industry.