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showing posts of October 2020
 
Reset 120 days RDS grace period
edited by on October 29th 2020, at 09:19
When installing the Remote Desktop Session Host role on a Windows Server, you get a 120 days grace period where you do not need to specify a license server and/or have licenses installed. After the grace period, it is no longer possible to log in with even a single session through RDP, unless you use the admin console (/admin option). Luckily, you can reset this counter by getting rid of a specific key which gets created at the start of the grace period, effectively resetting the grace period counter. This can even be done if the grace period isn't completely over.

Log in directly on the server (or use the /admin option) and fire up regedit.

Navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE:\SYSTEM\  ...
 
A list of most common SIP responses
edited by on October 22nd 2020, at 16:52

When troubleshooting VoIP, it is useful to know the most common responses in SIP messages. Similarly to HTTP, each response to a request contains a response code indicating the status/result of the request. A list of the most common response codes is found here:

https://www.3cx.com/pbx/sip-responses/

 
Black Manticore moved to new server
edited by on October 22nd 2020, at 15:12

Black Manticore has recently been moved to a new webserver. The biggest change was the migration from PHP 5 to PHP 7, which, because of the code's age, broke quite a few things. Because of this, the website has been offline for a good while in September, for which we apologize. Most things have been patched since and we expect everything to operate as expected.

Another issue with the tags was discovered lately, causing tags to be absent from new posts. This has been fixed as of today and all affected posts have been updated. Because of the high amount of different tags, we're planning on performing a reorganization and cleanup of the tags in the very near future.

 
Allow wallpaper selection in a VDI with OSOT applied
edited by on October 22nd 2020, at 14:39
When running the VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT), a lot of optimalization is performed to get the best possible performance out of your VDI environment. This also means certain items will be disabled of which you don't want them to be disabled, including some personalization aspects such as setting a wallpaper or a background color.

It is not possible to revert the change from outside the VDI-build: any settings applied through GPO or DEM do not get applied. This is because the local group policy takes precedence and OSOT sets several optimizations through the local group policy. By changing the local group policy in the golden image itself, you can get rid of some of the lockdowns.

To   ...
 
Unable to install NuGet provider for PowerShell (on older OS'es)
edited by on October 22nd 2020, at 14:37
When attempting to install modules from the Powershell Gallery, you may get errors on older versions of Windows Server (2008-2012R2), even after updating PowerShell to more recent versions. The errors are concerning unable to install the NuGet provider, required to download packages from PSGallery.

Errors are similar to:

WARNING: Unable to download from URI.

WARNING: Unable to download the list of available providers. Check your internet connection.

Unable to find package provider 'NuGet'. It may not be imported yet.

The reason for this is a problem with the cryptographic providers enabled on your system. PowerShell 5.1 enables SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 for secure HTTP connections, which are  ...
 
Convert OVF to OVA and vice-versa
edited by on October 22nd 2020, at 14:37

You can use VMWare's OVFTool to convert from OVF to OVA and vice-versa.

  1. Download and install OVFTool. Versions for Windows, Mac and linux are available. You'll need a (free) VMWare Account.
  2. Collect your OVF (and dependent files) and place them on the machine you've installed OVFTool on.
  3. Open a command prompt/Terminal and navigate to the folder where the files are located.
  4. Perform the conversion (adjusting command and paths according):
    For OVF to OVA (note that all files referenced in the OVF must be in the same folder):
    install-path\ovftool.exe C:\path\source.ovf C:\path\dest.ova
    For OVA to OVF:
    install-path\ovftool.exe C:\path\source.ova C:\path\dest.ovf
 
Switch to VMXNET3 in VMWare Fusion
edited by on October 22nd 2020, at 14:36
A not so documented feature is the support of VMXNET3 in VMWare Fusion. It cannot be configured through the UI but by manually editing the VM configuration file (VMX-file), you can leverage it (assuming you have installed VMWare Tools and/or are running a supported guest OS).

Open the file with your favourite text editor, but avoid using Apple's TextEdit as it has a tendency to replace regular quotes with opening/closing quotes, which will break your VMX-file. You can use Terminal and open the file using Nano if you want to be sure.

Network adapters are specified with ethernet*. as the starting line, where * = the number of the network adapter (0 is the first, 1 is the second, and so on).   ...
 
Manually update Office Click-to-Run installations
edited by on October 22nd 2020, at 14:35
You can manually trigger an update of Office Click-to-Run installations, without starting any of the Office applications. This can be useful in VDI-environments where it may be necessary to update Office in the source image.

To trigger the update, start the Click-to-Run client with the /update switch.

Perform the update (will show a progress bar):

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun\OfficeC2RClient.exe" /update user

Silently perform the update (don't show progress bar and force Office apps to restart):

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun\OfficeC2RClient.exe" /update user displaylevel=false forceappshutdown=true

Both comm  ...
 
 
showing posts of October 2020
 
 
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