I need to disable the Windows Game DVR for a collection of Windows computers that will be running student exam / testing software, so that students can't use the Game DVR hotkeys to record the test questions and choices.
These computers are not Windows 10 Home edition so group policy can be used, but they are also not managed by Active Directory, SCCM, or Azure Endpoint Manager. Is there a way to do it from the command line?
Is it possible to have a Microsoft KMS license server in the Azure cloud, that licenses physical Windows 10 laptops and tablets used by an organization's students/employees?
Apparently this is possible, though each personal device may need an administratively managed VPN client, such as Azure Point to Site VPN, to communicate with the organization's personal cloud KMS server.
I am not finding direct Microsoft documentation for physical device KMS licensing via the Azure cloud service, though perhaps they expect people to figure this out indirectly on their own?
I do see Microsoft documentation for using KMS for Azure server virtual machines and virtual desktops, but that seems to be unrelated.
On a Windows operating system, is there any way to have an isolated network interface or VLAN, that is only authorized to communicate with specific processes?
The interface or VLAN would be effectively hidden from all other system processes and to the rest of the system the privileged-access network interface / VLAN would not seem to be installed or accessible.
I have never heard of this, and it is probably not possible.
The closest alternative would be a virtual machine with a virtual adapter assigned to it, but that's not what I'm looking for.
I’m currently trying to debug a problem with Windows Deployment Services, where when it is set to ask the DHCP server for a multicast address range, the WDS service will not start because it gets an “Access Denied” response from DHCP.
I can’t find any documentation to explain what’s going on. But I am familiar with using the Windows SysInternals Process Monitor to examine what is happening with the various running processes to figure out where the problem is.
Though the way Microsoft runs services makes this really hard to diagnose. Rather than directly running each system service in its own separate process, instead Microsoft runs all of them as a surrogate of the service host.
And then also rather than each service getting its own service host process ID, in some cases a single service host is running multiple system services under it.
So using both the Task Manager and Process Monitor, it’s really hard to tell which service host is running WDS, and it might be grouped together with other unrelated services under the same process ID.
(The logic of when process sharing will occur under a single service host process ID is not obvious.)
I don’t understand why Microsoft decided to indirectly run services like this, though it a very old operating system design decision that goes back to at least Windows NT.
Perhaps the Microsoft engineers don’t even know anymore, and it’s just a familiar but obsolete/unnecessary system design they are carrying on with, but which they don’t really need to be doing.
The service host only seems to make the functionality of the operating system more obscure and difficult to debug when things go wrong.
Is the obfuscation intentional for some reason, perhaps to hide the functioning of their anti-pirating licensing mechanisms?
Is there currently a mechanism for constructing a hardware RAID array using storage devices that have a full-size PCIe slot, PCIe M.2, or PCIe U.2 bus interface, such as SSDs?
It is extremely unclear to me how this might work, since a normal hardware RAID has the drives directly plugged into the RAID controller via SATA or SAS interfaces, but meanwhile these new kinds of storage devices plug straight into the system PCIe bus without a separate drive/device controller.
I can foresee two possible hardware implementations:
(As of writing this, searching Server Fault for "U.2 RAID" or "M.2 RAID" turns up nothing, and I'm creating the tags "U.2" and "M.2". Is no one already doing this?)
Scenario:
Doing a server migration from old Server 2008 R2 to new Server 2016, following this Server Fault guide: File server migration using Robocopy
After Robocopy completes, enable deduplication on Server 2016 for the copied volume, and then use PowerShell to start dedpulicating manually. After many hours it completes and recovers about 25% of disk space.
Run Robocopy again to copy anything that may have been missed in the initial copy, as a final check of the new server.
....but Robocopy (run from Server 2016) doesn't understand deduplication and so instead proceeds to trash the deduplication chunkstore..
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBOCOPY :: Robust File Copy for Windows
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Started : Sunday, July 8, 2018 12:10:02 PM
Source : \\SERVER-2008\e$\
Dest : \\SERVER-2016\e$\
Files : *.*
Options : *.* /TEE /S /E /COPYALL /PURGE /MIR /ZB /NP /MT:32 /R:1 /W:10
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\
*EXTRA File 253504 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\DedupFileList.1
*EXTRA File 253504 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\DedupFileList.2
*EXTRA File 28 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\stamp.dat
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\COW\
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\COW\00010000\
*EXTRA File 196608 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\COW\00010000\00000046.00.RB
*EXTRA File 106496 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\COW\00010000\00000048.00.RB
[.......]
*EXTRA File 30.3 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\ChunkStore\{B7E1F3A4-AAD9-4449-9DF7-5489421C9EC5}.ddp\Stream\000f0000.00000002.ccc
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Logs\
*EXTRA File 29.7 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Logs\00000001.kmchange.log
*EXTRA File 999.8 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Logs\changes.optimization.1.10.archive.etl
*EXTRA File 1000.0 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Logs\changes.optimization.1.11.archive.etl
*EXTRA File 735.5 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Logs\changes.optimization.1.12.archive.etl
*EXTRA File 999.8 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Logs\changes.optimization.1.9.archive.etl
*EXTRA File 1.3 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Logs\changes.optimization.2.1.archive.etl
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Settings\
*EXTRA File 76 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Settings\Dedup.00.cfg
*EXTRA File 76 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Settings\Dedup.01.cfg
*EXTRA File 2228 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Settings\dedupConfig.01.xml
*EXTRA File 2228 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Settings\dedupConfig.02.xml
*EXTRA File 0 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\Settings\VolumeJobLock.bin
*EXTRA Dir -1 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\
*EXTRA File 2982 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\chunkStoreStatistics.xml
*EXTRA File 2592 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\dedupStatistics.xml
*EXTRA File 11.5 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\GCReservedSpaceBitmap.tmp
*EXTRA File 1.0 g \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\GCReservedSpaceContainer.ccc
*EXTRA File 46.0 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\GCReservedSpaceDeleteLogs.tmp
*EXTRA File 1.0 m \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\GCReservedSpaceFileList.tmp
*EXTRA File 4096 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\GroupCommitFlushControl0.bin
*EXTRA File 2066 \\SERVER-2016\e$\System Volume Information\Dedup\State\optimizationState.xml
[......]
I aborted it moments after seeing this fly by in the log and recognizing what was happening. But the damage is already done, the data on the deduplicated new server was instantly corrupted by Robocopy as it stormed through \System Volume Information. The new server drive partition has be formatted and recopied all over again from Server 2008.
Is there a safe way to use Robocopy so that it doesn't touch the deduplication volume data?
Also, I have a new concern.. if Robocopy can destroy a deduplicated volume, what else is unsafe to use with a deduplicated volume, that sees right through it and can destroy the underlying data that should only be accessible by the server? (probably should be a separate question..)
I work for a PK-12 public school district in the USA, in a very rural area with a large number of low-income families, and where many rural families only have 0.5 to 1.5 megabit DSL. In some cases people have no other low-cost Internet access option other than the obsolete 56k dialup modem, or going to a small and heavily overtaxed public library for Internet access.
Our district network is only 100 megabit, and when a single Windows 10 computer wants to install a large multi-gigabyte feature update, it can manage to download at 90+ megabit, and bring the rest of our Internet usage to a near-standstill.
,
I would like to set up a public Microsoft peer-to-peer update cache for these unmanaged public Windows 10 devices which are brought into our district by students and families, so that they can update their personal equipment without killing our Internet connection.
There does not appear to be any official way to set up a global/master p2p Windows update cache, with hundreds of gigs of disk space reserved for update retention, and with hundreds of days of update retention time. Microsoft provides zero documentation for how peer to peer updates work, and there is no graphical interface available to monitor p2p connections, or downloading from neighbor devices.
Can this be done? I am having a hard time determining if this is possible, what with Microsoft's lack of detailed documentation of how any of this really works.
Apparently Windows Update clients will only download p2p updates from their local subnet. If my district network has multiple subnets for client devices, is it possible to install multiple NICs or configure multiple VLANs to a single computer, so that its p2p update cache spans and shares updates across the many public client subnets simultaneously?
,
I am fine with setting up a Windows 10 Education or 2016 Server virtual machine that runs 24x7 with 250 gigs of disk space dedicated to caching every update that Microsoft issues for the next two years, so that public devices brought into the district for updating, will never use the Internet for Windows Update downloads.
Also if I can get a master public p2p update cache figured out for myself, I will also build one for our small public library, so that they too don't have their limited Internet bandwidth being constantly eaten alive by patron Windows devices brought to the library for updates.
Apparently from what I can determine, only managed devices registered with WSUS / SCCM are able to use an organization's internal managed update services, so there apparently is no way for Windows devices owned by students and families to access a managed windows update cache.
(Would this be more appropriate in Super User?)
I am transferring a bunch of gigabyte-sized files using SFTP over a fairly fast connection, between two servers running Ubuntu linux, with not much CPU load.
I am usually able to reach 5.0 MB transfer speeds (around 40 megabit/sec), though we have 90 megabit of bandwidth available and it doesn't seem to want to go any higher.
Running at 5.0 MB:
I can't get it to go any faster. If I open a second SFTP session, the two never exceed 5.0 MB combined.
And now for the actual question. Occasionally SFTP will transfer incredibly slowly for no apparent reason. Both machines are not busy, and the Internet connection is empty, yet the transfer plods along at around 120 KB/s.
What the heck is going on?
I know there is some sort of mechanism to keep SFTP from overloading a slow SSH connection, but that mechanism appears to be broken and unreliable.
How does a small organization with limited resources go about doing a restore test of its data backup system?
The cajoling of "Test your backups!" seems unrealistic when faced with the reality of what a full-scale restore test would involve, without affecting the mainline systems.
Assume the organization doesn't have tens of thousands of dollars worth of reserve server capacity just lying around to allocate for a temporary spin-up of a full test environment to verify the nightly backups are restorable.
Is there a way to justify purchasing all the mainline hardware a second time, just to do annual restore testing, but it otherwise sits there in storage, powered down and not used?
It has been suggested in other Server Fault discussions on media restore testing, to use a separate tape drive to confirm that media is usable in another device.
For a small site with only a few servers and a single production tape drive, it seems hard to justify buying an additional LTO-7 tape drive for thousands of dollars and additional licensing for the backup software to go with it, just to use it for a once-per-year media restore / test environment verification process and then stick it on a shelf and don't use it until next year's test process.
This is regarding the incremental hard-link method of backups, making a daily directory containing a copy of hard links to the original files, and rsync deleting the hardlinks and placing new files for anything changed since the last backup.
I have to contend with a really slow remote rsync NetGear ReadyNAS Duo with a tiny brain and which can only handle about 2 megabit/sec SSH copy rates, while I have 50+ megabit bandwidth available. I don't want to have the program to be backed up, to be shut down for hours while backup data trickles to the slow remote NAS.
Is there a way to make a fast temporary local copy of the specific files to be rsynched, to minimize application/database downtime?
Apparently from what I can determine, the best way to minimize application downtime would be something like this:
Is this the fastest way to cache the files to be rsynched remotely, or is there some other better method?
Is there a more automatic method to do this, that doesn't require all these separate scripted steps?
I have a pile of old unencrypted backup tapes I want to discard, and I'm looking for a really simple and free erase method.
I have previously used the following method to zero hard drives on linux. There's no progress indicator, but it runs as fast as possible:
cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda
(minutes pass.....)
cat: No space left on device
Is this just as effective on tape devices, since linux treats everything as a block device?
Booting the old server with Knoppix 7.4, I see:
/dev/tape/by-path/pci-0000:02:05.0-scsi-0:0:5:0
/dev/tape/by-path/pci-0000:02:05.0-scsi-0:0:5:0-nst
This is a Quantum DLT-V4 half-height SCSI drive.
I don't know which of the two device names I should use for wiping, but I assume it's the non-rewind "-nst" device.
Is it good enough to insert a tape to kill, and type:
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/tape/by-path/pci-0000:02:05.0-scsi-0:0:5:0-nst
Then when done (no space left on device), just eject and discard the tape?
Is it "just that easy", or am I overlooking something?
===FOLLOWUP===
I don't know how this website expects replies to comments to be handled. So I'm editing the question..
Time to wipe: To me, there is no issue setting up a wipe job for hours and changing the tape the next day or whatever. The server in question has been sitting unused and powered down for two years, so it really does not matter how long wiping takes.
I am not doing any device setup before writing so it may have hardware compression enabled, but overwriting with urandom pretty much guarantees the compression will be ineffective and the overwrite will be fast.
Rewinding: When a DLT tape is freshly loaded, isn't it already fully rewound? If not, issuing a "mt rewind" only takes a minute.
mt erase: The documentation of this command is ridiculously short. "Erases the tape." Okay, how? Zeroes the tape? Or overwrites with random data? No additional info seems to be available, and I don't know how to find out. Does it erase just a couple blocks at the front to make it appear empty, or the entire tape? Would I have to look at the command's source code to know?
This is Ubuntu (3.13.0-29-generic #53), trying to do a simple bash script to monitor a log file for matching lines.
If I do the following, there is no output in the bash shell except for matches, which is expected:
tail -F server.log | grep --line-buffered "word" | tee -a wordwatch.log
But if I try to do the same thing in a screen, the session is spammed with unmatched data from the watched log file. Apparently it's showing everything from the watched log file. This spam does not appear in the output log file.
screen -S "wordwatch" tail -F server.log | grep --line-buffered "word" | tee -a wordwatch.log
What am I doing wrong and how do I stop the watched log from spamming the screen session?