Enterprise Microsoft Q&A: Hello for Buttprint

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Enterprise Microsoft Q&A: Hello for Buttprint

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Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

IT Guy posted:

Unfortunately, we will never virtualize anything. Definitely not my decision but my co-workers/boss seem to think that it is "job security" when the executives look in and get intimidated by seeing 15 different physical servers humming along.

And totally set themselves up for failure. The losses in experience and cost savings is too much not to.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 14:45

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 23:56

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Tab8715 posted:

On another note, where does one start to encounter directory replication latency?

Just curious but have you ran the active directory replication status tool and had everything check out? Might be well beneath your problem but that would have been the first place I would have started.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 21:09

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

thebigcow posted:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowsitpro/2016/05/17/simplifying-updates-for-windows-7-and-8-1/

One giant rollup for everything between sp1 and April 2016

And when they say everything, they also mean the updates you might not want. LIke "uprade to 10" and all the sales data gathering updates.

# ¿ May 18, 2016 17:49

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Tab8715 posted:

Hopefully I'm not beating a dead horse but is it supported to completely virtualize all Domain Controllers for an entire forest/domain?

I'm 99% confident with answering yes but the lack of any official Microsoft documentation makes me a little and some of the previous virtualization engineers I've worked with have recommend against.

Yes. When is comes to domain controllers the most reliable environment and quickest recovery times are the only things that matter.

# ¿ May 23, 2016 19:41

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

FISHMANPET posted:

So, advanced SCCM restore question.

Someone maliciously deleted a task sequence and it would be nice to get it back. We don't back up the task sequences per se (but we may soon!) but we do backup the database nightly.

My first thought was to dig into the database and find the database field etc etc. I found a TS_TaskSequence table, but it has the entire task sequence stored in a giant encrypted string called Sequence. I haven't found any info on how to decode that, so that's a dead end.

So my second thought is use the database backup to restore to a test instance and export it there. This is a triple whammy because in addition to solving my current problem, it lets me test our backups and also gives me practice restoring from backup.

My problem with restoring from backup is I can't find information on restoring to a new instance rather than replacing my supposedly failed production instance. My current environment works just fine, I don't want to overwrite it or anything, I just want to restore it to a new site code. All the stuff I've found talks about restoring into your production instance, which I don't want.

Clone your sccm server and isolate it. Do the restore you are afraid to do, check and see if the results are as desired.

Why would someone delete a task sequence? Did he delete the task sequence or the folder it was stored in?

Sickening fucked around with this message at 21:25 on May 26, 2016

# ¿ May 26, 2016 21:23

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Dr. Arbitrary posted:

What's crazy is that it's not a normal service like the spooler, it's a custom one.

My understanding is that with group policy, you have to go out of your way to specifically disable services.

I don't see it in the GPOs, it's really twisting my brain up.

Maybe some devious architect made a policy to disable this service years ago on the off chance that we'd one day buy this product, install it and *trap sprung!*

Remove the folder that local group policy is saved in. This is one of the first thing I do before trying to figure out mysteries such as these.

To all of you using local group policy in 2016, gently caress you forever.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2016 22:26

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Zero VGS posted:

I got our Ops team some new laptops with i7-6700HQ processors in them, and they are still telling me that Excel 2016 32-bit on Windows 10 is painfully slow. Apparently even adding a row will freeze up Excel for a minute plus. They're assuring me that they're avoiding every potential inefficiency (like following all these tips: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff726673)

I'm about ready to throw up my hands. Ops is like 8 people who use Excel entirely to track performance of 500 employees, so they don't have a way to break these spreadsheets into smaller teams/tabs.

Is there any other workaround? I was considering maybe spinning up a VM on a powerful server so their laptops act more as thin clients and they can brute-force the calculations. Either that or have them use Excel Online but they hate that and it can't use their Salesforce plugins (neither can 64-bit Excel)

This is the same problem any organization will face if they attempt to use excel for large scale data manipulation.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2016 23:23

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Mr. Clark2 posted:

A question for anyone successfully using MDT to perform an upgrade from Windows 7 pro to Windows 10 pro: Where did you get the Win10 media to import into MDT? I've used the official MS media creation tool to download .iso files, but they dont import into MDT. I found different .iso files on some MS 'techbench', those will import into MDT but then my task sequence fails with various vague error messages that I have so far been unable to solve.

I think you need to focus on the error messages. Any windows 10 media should be able to do the job. I would honestly just use the profile export function built into mdt and do a fresh windows 10 install myself.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2016 18:10

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Potato Salad posted:

By preparing for other fields. I don't know whether there is another 10-15 years in windows admin careers left - at least at today's job availability. I'm studying my GMATs and looking at a cybersecurity degree.

I wonder how long people have been saying this exact same thing? It feels like 10-15 years already.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 14:58

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Turns out that places where admins who love to ebay/whitebox their environment don't foster rational discussion.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 22:26

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Thanks Ants posted:

Bring on the subscriptions. I want user CALs rolled into Office 365 licensing and Windows Server licensed annually.

I agree. As long as its an option and not the only method I am very happy with it.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 22:45

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Zero VGS posted:

What I don't like is being judged for having all the budget I could want, and choosing not to spend it all. Yes, I'm making things much harder on myself for trying to be responsible, but literally the entire world could be saved if there were more incentive to not be completely braindead with budgets.

"Oh, but you get what you pay for!", that's the single biggest pile of horseshit, and big IT cutting huge checks to MS and friends is the main reason for the sorry state of their software. We were paying half a million a year for a SaaS, and I just wrapped up paying a contract coder for 4 months to completely reverse engineer the thing. Now we have the same functionality and never have to pay another dime for it. Come to think of it the salespeople were mocking me for even having the audacity to suggest DIY-ing their one-trick-pony, under-supported poo poo, I'm going to relish shutting them down at the end of the month.

See, that's what I'm talking about, I get pigeonholed for eBaying 95% of my equipment. You know what's better than getting a Windows 10 Enterprise subscription? eBaying 500+ used Elitebooks and getting them all the free Windows 10 Pro upgrade. Where's the value in Enterprise? It's really worth just for what, DirectConnect and AppLocker?

If there is anything I want to buy in bulk for enterprise use, its used laptops. :allears:

I hope they were at least cleaned up before being sent do you. How many pounds of dead skin and food do you think there is in 500+ laptops?

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 23:37

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

incoherent posted:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/windows-10-one-year-later-the-anniversary-update/

Can someone help out the ones that doesn't want to read 10 pages of that crap to find useful info.

(like me)

# ¿ Aug 1, 2016 18:28

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

CLAM DOWN posted:

What do you want to know exactly?

What the gently caress is CCB for starters and what about this update is actually useful?

# ¿ Aug 1, 2016 18:50

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

MrMojok posted:

Yeah, I did censor the name. File Replication Service is set to auto and started on DC1.

Couple of things....

First, you really need to be more careful when posting infomation from a client. Not that what you posted was very damaging, but it just shows you are careless. Something awful is pretty small by the internet standards these days but its big enough to cause headaches.

Second, don't try and chase down every error in event viewer ESPECIALLY on a domain controller unless there is actually a problem. It is pretty maddening how common they are and how fruitless it is finding the cause of them can be. DCDIAG health check is a great start. You would be better suited in checking on DNS configuration than digging around in a DC event viewer.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2016 21:10

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

lol internet. posted:

Details on this magical IRC channel please.

There is 0 magical about it.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2016 21:16

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Gozinbulx posted:

Can anyone point me to a good guide/outline of group policy settings I should use to limit and hopefully seriously stymie the proliferation go malware/bloatware poo poo on workstations?

The one that standardizes who is allowed to be in the local admin group. The one that covers windows updates and enforces them to install and reboot. The one that covers with removable media. Web and email control aren't really well done in group policy.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2017 22:34

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Gozinbulx posted:

Thanks guys, alot to go by.

Out of curiosity, is there a group policy method to forbid the execution of msi's or other installer packages (short of whitelisting executebales and banning everything else)? All these workstations are non-admin yet i swear to god every couple of months I walk in and loving ROBLOX player is on there, I don't even know what it is (some kind of game thing) and I have no idea how they are allowed to install it.

Well in theory controlling where they can browse on the internet would help this. Applocker is fine-ish. It just takes a lot of planning and the realization that it isn't a catch all. You really need to get control of email and web before you can expect to make any real progress beyond the basics.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2017 17:36

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Orcs and Ostriches posted:

Is there any good way to change the local administrator accounts on domain computers? I don't want to use group policy preferences, but it'd be nice if there was some other group policy or sccm based solution.

This post is so confusing. Why would you give a poo poo which part of group policy you use?

# ¿ Feb 21, 2017 19:46

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Orcs and Ostriches posted:

Because group policy preferences store the password unencrypted or easily unencrypted in sysvol.

If that was your concern you probably should have said so. Powershell is basically the best option for doing it all at once. LAPS is the tool they made to do what you are wanting to do but I personally dislike it.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2017 19:51

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Windows drives aren't perfect but holy gently caress have we gone a long way from the old days. Generally, if you give windows a chance to choose the right driver and simply make it available the process is pretty simple. SCCM makes this process pretty loving simple. Display drives are in my experience the easiest of the bunch.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2017 16:14

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Wrath of the Bitch King posted:

Make sure you brush up on your outdated command lines utilities for active directory and your arbitrary Powershell cmdlets, since in the real world you'll never be able to reference them in a pinch.

That always irks me. Who in the world memorizes powershell commands for these specialized cmdlets? I get they need filler but this always ends up being needlessly tedious for their exams. Par for the course though.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 21:25

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

MF_James posted:

Do they not have help files loaded? Cisco makes you "memorize"/type commands etc but help will also be available in the CLi*

*Unless there is an issue with the sim OR you're on the wrong path

Its been a few years since I have taken a MS test but did they finally put an actual working sim into a test comparable to cisco? This would be the first I have heard of it.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 21:34

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

MF_James posted:

Do they not have help files loaded? Cisco makes you "memorize"/type commands etc but help will also be available in the CLi*

*Unless there is an issue with the sim OR you're on the wrong path

Just curious, but have you ever taken a MS exam before?

# ¿ Mar 9, 2017 23:35

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Internet Explorer posted:

This is exactly it.

RDS is fine, just make sure you use RDS Web Access instead of opening up RDP to the internet or using a VPN. It's a much better solution and any consultants worth their salt should be able to set you up.

Moving to "the cloud" with Software-as-a-Service requires a look at your business processes and changing what software you use and how you use it, which is not something I would trust an MSP to properly handle.

I am living this hell right now due to old sins by my boss. First, he made the unforgivable sin of making service accounts with simple names. Fax was the username that ran the fax software services. He then also had web facing servers with open RDP access. Of course this means that these boxes have had brute force attempts for years and the guessable account names get constantly locked out.

I am in the process of unfucking these issues right now because we have some friends in russia it appears that is dead loving set on brute forcing these systems after constant blacklisting of their ip's.

Bonus, it appears some of our oldest system have his own loving user account running them as a service. It appears he was resetting his password every 90 days x times (x being the amount he needed to change it back to his old password) to keep services running but was too embarrassed to tell me.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2017 20:28

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Internet Explorer posted:

gently caress lovely old bosses.

Also the password thing is why "minimum password age" exists. The amount of fuckery we have to do to limit the damage idiots can do is insane.

He only fessed up when he started getting the zero days old error when trying to change his password after I had caught the minimum password age issue for his and older accounts.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2017 20:35

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

AreWeDrunkYet posted:

As far as microsoft is concerned, I think group policy is dead. Their vision is a generic OS with application and security settings handled by intune.

But yeah, the same registry settings do different things from one update to the other. It can be maddening. And there's not clear visibility and documentation to the same extent there was in windows 7, but that may just be a matter of maturity.

Umm what? This seems like a really bizarre statement to make. Isn't it more likely that teams are not talking to each other effectively and updates are causing group policy bugs and less likely that Microsoft is abandoning group policy?

# ¿ Apr 13, 2017 18:32

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

stevewm posted:

You're assuming those teams even still exist after all the layoffs.

Lets assume nobody at Microsoft is working on group policy anymore. That seems more likely.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2017 19:01

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

EssOEss posted:

To explain a bit about the purpose - these images feed a second-stage automated image build process (using Packer). The content of the later stages changes often (even daily), as it includes custom developed software in the images. Right now the entire image build process has to start all the way from a clean Windows install, updating Windows and then deploying our custom software before ending with a sysprep to finalize the image.

As Windows only gets patches once a month, I would like to cut out the Windows patching step for the regular daily image builds that we do. The later Packer-driven part of the process requires an ISO to start with, hence why I am hoping to be able to create an ISO that installs a fully updated Windows.

In theory, I suppose starting from an ISO might just be a lack of imagination on part of the Packer authors - after all, if whatever startup process ends up with a working Windows, it is not likely that anything outside the build VM can tell the difference. What matters to me is that the whole stuff be automated (e.g. I have a PowerShell script that starts with a clean Windows ISO and ends up with whatever is needed to do an unattended install of a patched Windows, whether it be an ISO or something else). I will check out MDT tomorrow and see if I can bend it to this purpose - thanks for the hint! I have not used it before so if you have more tips to using it in this scenario, they would be most welcome!

I can honestly say that there are times when pre-loading a patch in an ISO has caused issues where post installing them as part of a process didn't. If you are having issues with overall installation time, its probably worth to do what you are doing. You will run into the issue of new patches coming out every month and you are trading some of the time you are saving by updating them. Just depends on the volume of your installations.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2017 19:52

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

orange sky posted:

If I had any power in deciding this, I wouldn't be in this situation. Any arguments you might use right now, I've used endless times. It's a nationwide public administration institution that publicly got a huge scare with WannaCry and wants to immediately terminate all XP use - but they have no drivers for the devices they use that support W10. So, 7 it is for these computers!

Also, this is gonna use an image (an ISO) that they previously built on their W7 deployment. A colleague of mine installed that ISO on a VM, captured it into a WIM and now we got that WIM and can't do poo poo because we can't mount it in dism and can't add it to SCCM OS images. Everything worked on his lab, however, so, it's a mistery?

E: Yeah it's still gonna be 32 bit cause that's the image that they have and want to distribute.

Consultant life yo

Well the process is broken. The person who makes the imagine should not be in the position to hand it off and say "good luck". I couldn't imagine being in a position where I make imagine but don't distribute them myself. I assume you are trying to use usmt in this process right?

# ¿ Aug 17, 2017 17:44

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Thanks Ants posted:

Tenant-to-tenant migrations are horrible in every way, I remain hopeful that Microsoft address the underlying need for them to even happen and can work on some sort of temporary federation with mailbox move for instances where companies merge/split and are both using Office 365.

There is one in my future. Why are they so poo poo?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 23:21

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Internet Explorer posted:

Is it possible you are changing your password twice in one day? Some places have a minimum password age requirement to stop people from resetting them a bunch of times in a row to bypass the "not used in the last 12 passwords" requirement to go back to an old password.

The old "zero days old" thing. That is probably it.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2018 20:04

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Caf posted:

There will be no MSI installer for Office 2019. It's all going click-to-run.

As long as these click to run packages just loving work. The entire point to the offline installer was so that a freshly imaged machine was ready for a person to sign in and launch the loving apps they wanted. If the user has to sign in and download a bunch of poo poo that needs instructions there entire premise is idiotic.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 19:00

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Jeoh posted:

Premier support is still kinda poo poo for O365 tbh. Spent half a hour on a conference call with a dude who was clearly unprepared despite giving him the questions in advance. Motherfucker, just put us through to the product team.

Good luck. They are graded on how little they forward to product team so getting a tech to give up on your ticket is close to impossible.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2018 20:08

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

KillHour posted:

I'm not implementing this. I just need to give our sales guys a "this is technically possible and here is how it's done" and they can whip our devs bloody to make it happen.

I like how you are deciding if it can happen and not the devs. That makes sense.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2018 16:00

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Internet Explorer posted:

You guys have to remember that he's selling a custom software solution to a client. He's not in-house IT, not a consultant being hired to set up infrastructure, his job is to sell a custom software. So from his point of view WMI is great because it just means that the customer has to have the firewall port open and have the service enabled, their software will do the rest. It doesn't matter if the solution is less than ideal or isn't flexible or robust.

What does make me wince though is saying that Event Log shipping is somehow less reliable than WMI. If you're ruling out Event Log shipping due to technical issues, WMI isn't any better. If it's for business reasons, that's a different discussion.

Are you saying software vendors are playing fast and loose with important design decisions?"

# ¿ Apr 26, 2018 16:04

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Although I have done this a million times already, is there anyway to do bitlocker deployements that don't force rebooting? As in, Every deployment I have ever done has gone through a partion phase, reboot, then the rest of the deployment.

# ¿ May 3, 2018 19:49

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Potato Salad posted:

Over the air AD is at this point a commodity, have you actually tested any products out?

# ¿ May 4, 2018 03:02

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

The Fool posted:

It is, you can control the setting via GPO.

However, the setting will only apply to newly provisioned drives. It is not possible to change the bitlocker mode once it has been deployed.

While you can't change the mode, you can remove bitlocker and add it again with the new settings. I am pretty sure every team that is new to bitlocker runs into this issue at least once.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2018 16:02

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 23:56

Sickening: Jul 16, 2007; Black summer was the best summer.

Guy I know r/sysadmin is a cellpool of poo poo but this issue hit there days before it hit this forum.

Its worth it to browse there briefly every day or so.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2019 03:55

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Enterprise Microsoft Q&A: Hello for Buttprint

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