Jason Yoder, MCT

Updated: May 15, 2015 When this article was originally published, two extra carriage returns were add causing the code to malfunction.  The code below is correct.   My client for this week’s PowerShell class had a really interesting question. They needed to know where an account is being locked out at. OK, interesting. Apparently users hop around clients and forget to log off, leading to eventual lock out of their accounts. The accounts can be unlocked, but are then relocked after Active Directory replication. This problem is solved in two parts. The first one is to modify the event auditing on the network. The second part is resolved with PowerShell. The first part involves creating a group policy that will encompass your Domain Controllers. In this GPO, make these changes. Expand Computer Configuration \ Policies \ Windows Settings \ Security Settings \ Advanced Audit Policy Configuration \ Audit Policies \ Account Management Double click User Account Management Check Conf

In a previous article, I showed you how to install data deduplication using the GUI. In this article, we will install data deduplication remotely via PowerShell. On a your 2012 server, open Server Manager. The following assumes that you have added the remote server to the Server Manager that you are working on. In Server Manager, click All Servers . Right click the server that you want to install data deduplication on and select Windows PowerShell Type Add-WindowFeature –Name FS-Data-Deduplication and press Enter . Wait for the process to complete. No reboot of the remote server is necessary. Once installed, we use the Enable-DedupVolume –Volume E: cmdlet to enable data deduplication on the E: drive. Using Get-DedupVolume will let you see all the volumes on this server that has data deduplication enabled on them. Use the Get-DedupSchedule cmdlet to get the current deduplication. The current deduplication optimization that is scheduled runs at low priority. If you want to crea

This is one that I have been thinking about for a while. One of my students in a server 2008 class pointed me to an article that corrected my train of thought. The question is, why is the Everyone group granted access when a share is created? Remember, I’ve been an MCSE since Windows NT4. At that time, the Everyone group included all authenticated users, and those who were on the network anonymously. I found this to be a security vulnerability so I have been advising students to remove this and use the Authenticated Users group instead for general share access for your entire domain. (Caution, it you have a trust relationship set up with another organization, they are also a member of the Authenticated Users group.) This article from Microsoft explains that the anonymous users have been removed from the Everyone group. This change happened in Windows 2003/XP.

Per Microsoft , Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 will support up to 50 snapshots.  Remember that the more snapshots you created, the slower the performance of the virtual machine.  Also, the physical drive capacity will be used.  When you create a snapshot, a differencing disk is create for every VHD file that VM uses.  The more snapshots you create, the more physical hard drive capacity will be used.

In some cases you may want to manually start an deduplication process on your Windows Server 2012 storage devices that are configured for data deduplication. Here we see the same set of files located in three different areas of our e: drive. To do this, utilize PowerShell. Type Get-DedupVolume Since we have not performed any deduplication, we do not have any savings. Type: Start-DedupJob –Full –Path e: -Type Optimization You can get the results by typing Get-DedupJob The Data Deduplication Service is set to manual because it is either activated via a scheduled task or by PowerShell By executing Get-DedupStatus –Path e: Since only files that are greater than 32KB can be optimized by data deduplication, only the files that start with Colors will be processed. The total size of these files are 1053KB per instance. The SavedSpace attribute reflects the removed duplicate data plus the reference pointers for the removed data to a full copy of that data.

The Active Directory Recycle bin was a very welcomed addition to our arsenal of tools.  It allowed us to recover objects from the AD Recycle Bin without losing any of their properties.  This was don entirely inside of PowerShell.  Now on Server 2012, you can perform this functionality in the Active Directory Administrative Center. You can learn how to enable to AD Recycle Bin here. In the image below, you can see a user named John Doe .  We can see that John has the Description property populate with “IT Manager”.  Without the AD Recycle Bin, a recovery of this object from a tombstone state would have caused us to lose this data.  More importantly, we would have lost the SID associated with this account.  Using PowerShell, Lets get the SID of this account for comparison purposes. We can see the SID ends in 1122.  The next step is to delete this object. Switch the AD Administrative Center to Tree View and then click Deleted Objects . Right click the object that you want to re

To utilize Storage Pools, we first need to create one. On your server, open Server Manager . Click File and Storage Services . Click Storage Pools Click Tasks in the upper right hand corner and select New Storage Pool . In the Before you begin window, click Next . In the Name field, type a name for your storage pool. For this example, I am using the name UserDataPool . Click Next In the Select physical disks for the storage pool window, click on the disks that you want to use. If you do not see the disk that you want to use, verify that the disk is unformatted. Also, the following disk types are supported: · iSCSI · SAS · SATA · SCSI · USB If you are going to use failover clustering with this storage pool, the only disk types that are supported are: · iSCSI · SAS The number of disks that you select will determine the type of a storage pool you can create. 1 disk is the minimum. 2 disks is the minimum for redundancy through mirroring. 3 disks are required for redundancy throug

After you have installed the Disk Deduplication functionality into Windows Server 2012, you also get a new program called DDPEval.exe By running this utility, you can get an estimate of you disk capacity savings should you implement disk deduplication on a volume. In the example below, you can see how much space would be saved by implementing disk deduplication on this volume. This volume would greatly benefit from disk deduplication. This command will only run on a volume that you have not enabled disk deduplication. If you run it after you have enabled it, you get the following error:

When working with Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012, you may notice a Storage Space that you did not create called Primordial . This is simply a holding pool for all unallocated disks that are connected to the server that you are currently managing. If you create a storage pool, you will be able to grab the disks from this pool to use in the new storage pool.

With Sever 2012, you can still use the old Disk Management MMC to manage disks like you have since Windows 2000. In Server 2012, you have a new option. For Server 2012 you can use the File and Storage Services in Server Manager to accomplish the tasks that you use to perform in the Disk Manager. Open Server Manager and click File and Storage Services . Click on the Disks menu item. Take a look below. You can see that Disk 0 is offline. Right click disk 3 and select Bring Online . Click Yes to confirm if prompted. To format the disk, right click it again and select New Volume . Click Next . If you are managing the disks on a different server, make sure you select the correct server. Also, click the disk the create the volume on. Click Next . Select how much of the drive that you want to include in the volume and click Next . The default is the maximum drive capacity. On the Assign to a drive letter or folder window, select what is appropriate for your environment. Click Next .

Over many years as a Network Administrator, I constantly struggled with the data storage needs of my users. Not only did we need to allocate funds for greater amounts of storage, but also greater amounts of funds for backup and recovery operations that would meet the needs of the organization. One of the big problems was duplicate information being stored by multiple users. Duplicate data adds to your cost in several ways. · Increase in storage cost due to capacity depletion from duplicated data. · Increased number of backup media, and the cost associated with storage, transportation, and replacement of the media. · Increased recovery times. · Purchasing and deployment of new disaster recovery hardware so backup and recovery operations can stay within established time frames. Data Deduplication can help reduce the cost of the above bulleted points. Data deduplication will remove duplicated blocks of data and place references to a single copy stored on the volume. It works well for data

In Windows Server 2008, we were able to manage different servers in the Server Manager. The problem with this implementation is that we could only manage one server at any one time. In windows Server 2012, we now have the ability to quickly switch between multiple servers, and to execute the same functionality against multiple servers at the same time. To do this, we need to add the servers that you want to manage to your server manager. In Server Manager , right click All Servers and select Add Servers . Type in the name, or part of the name of the server. Click Find Now . Click the name (or names) of the servers that you want to manage from this server and click the right pointing arrow button. Click OK . You can now manage the new server from this physical server’s Server Manager.