matt wilkie's questions

I have set Windows Server 2016 Standard to perform a local backup to a usb drive on a nightly basis at 9pm. The last several runs failed because the destination was disconnected. I've since reconnected it and want to test to make sure it will resume working tonight, as well just get a known-good backup as soon as possible. How do I manually trigger the scheduled backup? I can't find it Task Scheduler.

Under Computer Management >> Task Scheduler >> Task Status, Last 24 Hours I see an item called "Microsoft-Windows-WindowsBackup". Double-clicking on it and right-click context menu don't offer anything. I also can't find a similarily named item under "Active Tasks".

Digging further down in the expanding left hand navigation tree there is no "Windows Backup" or "Backup" or other similar word combination that I've been able to find.

All of the tutorials I've seen (such as here) for using Rewrite rules with Apache on Centos show how to enable .htaccess and then put the rules in there, which requires enabling AllowOverRide All in httpd.conf for the www directory being used.

From a security standpoint I would think it better to keep .htaccess disabled and put the rewrites into httpd.conf (or .../sites-enabled/example.net.conf). Indeed, this is the advice of the Apache manual, When (not) to use .htaccess.

Is there a good reason using httpd.conf for rewrites isn't common practice?

My Windows event log is full of Application Errors like:

Event Type: Error
Event Source:   Userenv
Event Category: None
Event ID:   1041
Date:       2016-03-07
Time:       11:19:36 AM
User:       NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer:   SERVER99
Description:
Windows cannot query DllName registry entry for {CF7639F3-ABA2-41DB-97F2-81E2C5DBFC5D} 
and it will not be loaded. This is most likely caused by a faulty registration.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I've not searched exhaustively but it appears the addresses are only {CF7639F3-ABA2-41DB-97F2-81E2C5DBFC5D} and {7B849a69-220F-451E-B3FE-2CB811AF94AE}. Microsoft's site is singularly unhelpful:

"There is no additional information about this issue in the Error and Event Log Messages or Knowledge Base databases at this time. You can use the links in the Support area to determine whether any additional information might be available elsewhere."

I found a few threads that indicating (in|unin)stalling IE8 is at fault and searching for and deleting the key within {} braces is a cure. Having once too often been victim of self-inflicted cargo-cult sys-admin I prefer to not go blindly removing registry entries. Before I do that is there anyone here have better advice or insight as to the real cause?

If OS version is relevant, the computer is Windows Server 2003 R2 x64, updates relatively current (about 1 month behind).

We have a machine running Windows Server 2012 that is using DHCP for ip assignment, in an Active Directory network. It is standard protocol for us to use static ip and no one recalls changing this machine.

Is there a way to determine when the LAN adapter configuration was changed from static to DHCP after the fact? It was likely many months ago. (Maybe even forever, possibly someone just never assigned static to begin with.)

In Active Directory, how do I efficiently remove all users from GroupA who are members of GroupB? Basically I want to subtract B from A.

Have now:

AAA         BBB
---         ---
Alice       Alice
Charlene    Bruce
Chuck       Chuck

Desired:

AAA         BBB
---         ---
            Alice
Charlene    Bruce
            Chuck

I have the user lists in csv at the moment but can reorganize quickly to something else if needed:

logon, group
alice, AAA
alice, BBB
bruce, BBB
...

I'm not an AD admin, just a user who has write privileges for these groups.

Are there performance or permission or other considerations to think about when using a mklink path to a network share versus just a straight UNC path (or mapped drive for that matter).

For example, can these three ways of accessing a network resource be considered functionally equivalent and roughly interchangeable?

mklink /d c:\shares\warehouse \\server1\warehouse
xcopy /s c:\shares\warehouse d:\temp\warehouse_copy

.

xcopy /s \\server1\warehouse d:\temp\warehouse_copy

.

net use X: \\server1\warehouse
xcopy /s X:\ d:\temp\warehouse_copy

Server is Windows 2003, clients are Win7 Pro. Network is mostly gigabit, though there are few 100mbit laggards here and there. I used a cmd shell in the example because it's easiest to explain, in practice the resource would be accessed by a variety of other methods also (Windows Explorer, Office "open" dialogs, system backup services, etc.)

I'm trying to retrieve information about members of an active directory group using dsget. The command retrieves some but not all members (53 of 141). The problem group contains a child group. The same command syntax with other groups not having a child group is successful. Docs for dsget make it clear quering sub groups is expected to work.

dsget group "CN=MyGroup,OU=Users and Groups,DC=example,DC=ca" -members -expand -c | dsget user -samid -display

dsget failed:CN=SomeChildGroup,OU=Users and Groups,DC=example,DC=ca:The object class of the target does not match the one specified on the command line.
type dsget /? for help.  samid       display
  dandithe    Danny.Dithers
  adamaca     Adam.Abacus
  sarahso     Sarah.Soother
  colcust     Colin.Custard

This is run on a client workstation (win7) from a user account that does not have any domain admin privileges. Adding or removing the -expand parameter for recursively querying sub-groups seems to have no effect. Neither does -c for continue on error.

Any idea what is wrong and how to work around it? Please keep in mind I have no domain privileges.

There are numerous articles about how to enable System Restore on Windows Server 2003. My question is, why is it not there in the first place? One would think a service like this is even more important on a server where long term stability is paramount than on a workstation.

On Windows Server 2003 x64 I had a drive volume become temporarily unavailable (an external iscsi storage device). In the course of troubleshooting I rebooted the machine, and the external volume did become available again until after the reboot. Now the shares I had pointing to the external volume are no longer available. The registry shows the missing shares and their permissions. How do I get them back?

I would like to avoid recreating them as new shares as it will be some work to apply the various permission levels to each.

This is what "Computer Management > Shared Folders" shows now (system shares omitted):

Maps   E:\maps
Work   E:\Work

and it should be:

Maps   E:\Allofit\maps
Work   E:\Allofit\Work
Archives  G:\Archives
Warehouse G:\Warehouse

And here are the registry entries for the missing shares (hex values omitted):

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\lanmanserver\Shares]
"Archives"=hex(7):43,00,53,00,43,00,46,00,6c,00,61,00,67,00,73,00,3d,00,30,00,00,\
  ...
  00,00
"Warehouse"=hex(7):43,00,53,00,43,00,46,00,6c,00,61,00,67,00,73,00,3d,00,30,00,\
  ...
  00,65,00,3d,00,30,00,00,00,00,00

Possible Duplicate:
Can you help me with my software licensing question?

We're in the process of migrating a large number of users to a newer version of an important software package that introduces a large number of system changes. We need to be able to reliably re-create (run) the old environment for certain operations. So naturally I turned to a virtual machine setup. It's perfect for this.

I used vmware converter to create a virtual machine from a Dell ATG laptop. When I boot the vm in vmware workstation Windows XP tells me it needs to be activated. Obviously I can't use the product key from the laptop, it's still in use, and I as I understand the license is tied to the hardware in any case. However we do have MS volume licensing. How can I switch the laptop-vm from an OEM license to our Windows volume license? The activation wizard tells me the VL key I'm entering is invalid. I can't logon to the vm. After entering username and password I get presented with the activation wizard.

I think I could install our VL-windows overtop the OEM-Windows, but then I run the risk of contaminating the operating environment for our application. I think the actual risk of this is low, but I would certainly have to spend hours doing Windows Updates and applying software patches to get everything up to speed again. I'm hoping to avoid that.

Using php, how might I redirect all pages under a folder to a different domain?

Current site:

http://www.example.org/dept
http://www.example.org/dept/stuff
http://www.example.org/dept/more
http://www.example.org/dept/more/stuff

New site:

http://www.example-too.org/pets/stuff
http://www.example-too.org/pets/more
http://www.example-too.org/pets/more/stuff

I've learned about how to redirect a single page:

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example-too.org/pets/more/stuff" );
?>

but how to apply this to dozens of pages without creating a php redirect for each one?

[edit] I understand using web server config (apache mod_rewrite) and/or .htaccess is the best way to handle multiple redirects like this, but I those options aren't available to me.

thanks.

I have a computer on a windows Active Directory network for which reverse dns lookup fails. It doesn't matter which machine runs the lookup. The problem computer is a debian vm on a windows server 2003 host.

>nslookup wiki.dept
Server:  primary.internal.domain.org
Address:  192.111.222.44

Name:    wiki.dept.internal.domain.org
Address:  192.111.111.185


>nslookup 192.111.111.185
Server:  primary.internal.domain.org
Address:  192.111.222.44

*** primary.internal.domain.org can't find 192.111.111.185: Non-existent domain

Contents of /etc/resolv.conf on the debian guest:

nameserver 192.111.111.244
nameserver 192.111.222.44
search internal.domain.org

What is wrong? how do I get ip-to-name resolution to work for this machine? Thank you.

For example with the following query I can select all the records I want to change, but then how do do the change? e.g. change all occurences of "seven" to "four"?

SELECT * FROM `templates` WHERE `attrib_B` LIKE `seven`

This is how I think of it in pseudo code:

if `attrib_B` like `seven`:
    set `attrib_B` = `four`

Thanks.

With Apache2 how may I require a valid user for every page except these special pages which can be seen by anybody?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Update in response to comments; here is a working apache2 config:

<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
</Directory>

# require authentication for everything not specificly excepted
<Location / >
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "whatever"
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/htpasswd
    Require valid-user
    AllowOverride all                       
</Location>

# allow standard apache icons to be used without auth (e.g. MultiViews)
<Location /icons>
    allow from all
    Satisfy Any
</Location>

# anyone can see pages in this tree
<Location /special_public_pages>
    allow from all
    Satisfy Any
</Location>

On Windows there are system default printer forms which can't be deleted from the Print Server Properties dialog. Is there some other way they can be removed? We are never going to use page sizes like Envelope, B5(JIS), US Std Fanfold, etc. and I'd like to save users (and myself!) from having to scroll through a big long list of noise.

Our print servers are Windows Server 2003 if that makes any difference.

How might one control the label for mapped drives as they appear in My Computer, from the command line?

The goal is to have the drive letter at the beginning of the phrase instead of the end, so when navigating with the keyboard one simply types the drive letter to jump to that item in the list. So, for example:

net use x: \\servername\skunkworks

will show this in My Computer:

skunkworks on 'Long descriptive name of file server (servername)' (X:)

but what we want is something like:

X: Skunkworks on Servername

One can interactively change the label with Windows Explorer, but this must be done seperately for every user profile and is a pain. It'd be really nice to relabel the drives as part of the login script.