Uncategorized Archives - Page 2 of 2

Using the Connector with a PC that is already domain joined, to add it into the Essentials Dashboard – Server 2012 R2 Essentials

By David | July 12, 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

I recently came across a problem whereby a number of PCs had been manually added to a domain within a Server 2012 R2 Essentials environment. The customer wanted to be able to connect to the computer remotely via Remote Web Workplace. Therefore the connector needed to be installed.

When you try and install the connector on a PC that is already joined to the domain you get an error saying that a duplicate name already exists on the network (yes, the PC you’re on!).

To resolve the error you need to add a registry key/hack on the client machine which bypasses the domain join section of the wizard. See below:

reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\ClientDeployment” /v SkipDomainJoin /t REG_DWORD /d 1

Original Article were the solution was posted:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/603bf59c-4b1f-4fa1-817e-8d0a6bbf236f/how-to-join-a-client-pc-to-ws2012e-r2-thats-already-a-member-of-another-enterprise-domain-using-the?forum=winserveressentials

Deleting old Windows Server Backups from an external hard drive

By David | June 25, 2016 | Comments 2 comments

I encountered an issue recently whereby one of our clients servers was running low on disk space. This resulted in the server being unable to complete a Windows Server Backup. The backup destination in this instance was an external USB drive.

To resolve the issue I carried out the following steps:

Opened Disk Management
Right Clicked the backup partition on my backup drive and selected the option for ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’
Specified the drive letter as ‘F:’
Opened an Elevated Command Prompt
Ran the command ‘diskshadow’
Ran the sub command ‘delete shadows oldest f:’
(Ran the command multiple times until I was happy with the free disk space)
Removed the Drive letter from Device Management

Please note, this is really only a temporary fix. The correct solution is to replace the Backup drives with drives that had a bigger capacity.

Credit to the following article for finding this solution:
http://www.mcbsys.com/blog/2012/11/delete-old-windows-server-backups/

Server 2008 R2 (SBS2011) – DNS Access Denied – Network (Unauthenticated)

By David | June 21, 2016 | Comments 41 comments

Recently I had a client with an SBS2011 who lost power to the server. Client PCs were unable to access the server resources and errored saying that the PC may have been compromised.

When the server had rebooted the network location had changed to Unauthenticated. When trying to access the DNS console I was getting an error saying Access Denied.

See below for reference:

DNS Access Denied

DCDiag was failing on connectivity but Active Directory Users and Computers was accessible.

After a while I managed to resolved the error by running the below command followed by a reboot:

nltest /sc_change_pwd:domainname.local

Command Description:
Changes the password for the trust account of a domain that you specify. If you run nltest on a domain controller, and an explicit trust relationship exists, then nltest resets the password for the interdomain trust account. Otherwise, nltest changes the computer account password for the domain that you specify. You can use this parameter only for computers that are running Windows 2000 and later.

Once the server had rebooted the network location changed back to ‘Domain’ and DNS was accessible. All client machines was then able to access the server.

Comments on my blog have indicated that this fix also works with Server 2012 R2.