I have a PPTP VPN running on 'MachineA' (set up in Routing and Remote Access) to connect to a customer site.
I have tried to create a permanent route from MachineB with MachineA as the gateway, but I'm unable to ping any servers at the customer site. Should this work?
The customer servers are on 10.0.0.x range and I have added:
route add 10.0.0.0 mask 225.255.255.0 192.168.0.17 metric 1
...but I still can't ping any machiens on 10.0.0.x range.
I've noticed one of our web servers has incredibly slow disk drive speed when copying files. The server is a bare metal Dell server hosting a single VM (virtualized mainly for backup and DR purposes).
The VM has two VHD drives, one hosted on an SSD the other hosted on an SCSI HDD. The SSD based one is fine and performs at close to host speed. However even the read speed of the HDD based VHD is terrible. I'm only getting around 3MB per second when copying to the SSD and often it drops to 300KB per second when copying lots of smaller files. What could be causing this extreme loss in performance? The drive appears to have negligible fragmentation.
Why do Windows Updates which trigger reboots of live web servers at peak time?
Is there any way I can stop this happening?
Windows Update is already configured to install updates at 6am, but the server rebooted at 09:45am.
Updates should be installed during the maintenance window from what I can see:
I'm trying to create a Windows Server 2016 instance on Hyper-V 2008 and it fails to boot from the ISO because of a stop error "MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION". Is installing 2016 not possible on an OS as old as 2008 R2?
I've tried installing the same ISO on Windows 10 HyperV and that works OK.
Is the only solution to upgrade the host OS to a later version?
We have a (partly) decommissioned Windows 2003 server (of year 2000 vintage) which has been running fine until I had to turn it off for the first time in months due to a planned power outage.
The server boots and responds to ping, but the GUI shows it's stuck at "Applying Security Policy" (over 12 hours each on two attempts). I cannot connect with Remote Desktop, but I can connect with Services.msc and remote registry etc which is strange. I get "Access Denied" if I try and access the Event Log remotely (as domain admin). All normal services appear to be running OK.
I'm wondering if it's looking for, or dependent on one of our other recently decommissioned servers has we have recently decommissioned a PDC and it's likely this is the first time this machine has rebooted since decommissioning the old PDC.
Where would I start with trying to diagnose this problem? Please be aware I'm not a sysadmin - I'm a web developer, so avoid funky acronyms if possible ;)
How does Windows find/discover the Domain Controller when you log in?
I've added a new DC to my domain as a backup, but I'm not sure how the computers will know to look for it, as I don't quite understand the process of how Windows domain login works from a protocol point of view.
Can I add a static route to a VPN network if the default gateway IP is dynamic? (Windows 7)
This is easy to solve with a permanent route if the default gateway does not change as you can do this:
route add 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.117.232 -p
However the VPN created by our customer's firewall assigns a dynamic IP address for the VPN's default gateway and as such, the last block of the IP can change.
Is there any way to do this via adapter only? Or using an IP range?
We're running Windows 2000 as our domain controller (!) and a separate backup domain controller, but as the PDC is 12 years old we would like to replace it. We have a couple of 2008 R2 and Win 2012 (virtual) servers in the office used for other functions which we would like to use as the PDC/BDC.
Is there a way to migrate the domain controller function from the Win 2000 server to the Win 2012 server or would we have to go via 2003 or 2008? Is it a simple matter of adding the new servers to the domain and somehow promoting them to be the primary domain controller or is it more complicated? Overall it's a small network with around 12 computers. Unfortunately I wasn't the one to set up the network in the first place so I'm not totally familiar with domains and Active Directory etc. Any help or advice would be appreciated.
I currently host a DNS server to make it easier to manage our company's subdomains (we're web-devs). However we need to change the IP address of one of the DNS servers as the DNS service has been migrated to a new server hosted with to a new provider.
I seem to recall it's not as simple as just changing the A record of the ns2.domain.com as it has to be "globally registered" with the root servers or something? I can see where I changed the DNS server's registration details in my Network Solutions account and presumably I need to change the A record at the same time.
Before I change the A record for the DNS server though, I would like to find out the answer to the following: What does the "nameserver registration" process actually do and how can I validate it has been done correctly (eg from command line queries or using online tools)?
How can I tell if I have Windows 2012 R2 or just "2012"? I can't seem to see any signs of "R2" anywhere yet I ordered a (remote) server with this installed and I want to verify I have the correct edition installed before I go any further with the server build.
I noticed today that a server was very low on memory. It physically has 8GB installed and runs Windows 2008 R2 Standard 64bit. It also hosts 2 virtual machines using HyperV. Server is Dell Poweredge R510.
However the host OS reports in task manager that it only has 4GB of RAM, despite actually having 8GB and it being a 64bit OS. Computer properties shows Installed memory: 8.00GB (3.99GB usuable). Why would "usable" be half the real RAM installed under a 64bit OS?
Additionally nearly all of the 4GB of visible RAM on the host OS is being used by something without anything showing up in task manager (presumably HyperV as it's allocated 3.6GB to the virtual machines its hosting). However that doesn't explain where the other 4GB has gone which Windows can't even see.
Where is my missing 4GB of RAM?
Update: Dell OpenManage says this: Total Installed Capacity 8192 MB Total Installed Capacity Available to the OS 4096 MB
So looks like Nathan's suggestion of memory mirroring might be correct. I'll have to reboot to check this (I think?)
Update 2 OK. So I reboot and I get a message saying "the amount of system memory has changed" (despite not having touched the hardware in a year). Once Windows has booted, all 8GB is visible again. Looks like I probably have a hardware RAM issue (I'll perhaps try reseating it whenever I can chuck everyone off the server next). Thanks for your answers and comments. I was hoping it was going to be the mirrored-RAM option but it seems not - that's not even mentioned in the BIOS.
I keep finding that on our small company LAN (7 users, 3 servers) that some servers keep becoming "not accessible" for the purposes of file sharing. They display the message "\SERVER is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. The user name could not be found". But I don't know why "the user name could not be found" as all the machines are on the same domain and the PDC and BDC seem to be behaving OK.
EDIT:
VPN seems to be the cause:
It turns out I can see the server if I use the IP address (\\1.2.3.4\ etc) or the FQ active directory name (eg \server.domainname.local) but not if I use the server name on its own or a mapped network drive originally created from the "short" name. Oddly though, my machine has no issue resolving the server's DNS name as I can ping the machine name OK and it immediately comes back with the IP, however nslookup seems to fail.
It seems to be a problem with how Windows looks up machine names when connected to VPNs. When I'm connected to a VPN, windows seems to use the DNS assocated with the VPN and not the one on the domain controller. This behavior to me, seems incorrect as surely that would mean connecting to any VPN would break any ability to lookup local machine names for servers and printers etc. So I guess the real question now is, how can I make my machine still search the local Active Directory DNS (the PDC) even when connected to a VPN?
More info in my comments below.
I'm struggling with DNS caching issues on a Windows based LAN.
I've noticed that if I change a DNS record on a domain hosted by a 3rd party nameserver, that I always seem to be the very last person to see the change happen. I can often query the domain using a service which checks propagation around the world like www.whatsmydns.net but I usually find that all other DNS servers are correct and it's only my own server which has the old IP - even 8-12 hours later. This is an issue for us as we're website developers and often making changes to DNS records so these huge delays are frustrating.
It seems to be because our primary domain controller server (+Active Directory & DNS) on our LAN (which is also our local DNS server) caches records for AGES (Way beyond it's published TTL). How can I stop the Windows DNS server from caching, or reduce the caching to only an hour or so?
We're considering moving from physical dedicated servers to leased virtual machines. I understand that a common problem with virtual machines is the performance of the SAN they are running from. As a quick test, I wanted to benchmark the performance of a few different virtual machines. I will test my own VM, as a control (no contention) and trial accounts with a couple of major providers like MS Azure.
I'm currently using HD Tune free, but I think I'm having a problem with caching. The performance seems low most of the time (slower than an old standard SATA drive) but then suddenly the test will spike to a really high level and messes up the results (as I'm only interested in raw performance - not cached performance). I also see this effect on one of the SCSI based machines (not a VM) I've tested on, so I can only assume that the SCSI controller and SAN controllers are using a large cache.
Is there a better way to test disk performance than using HD Tune, which is perhaps not subject to the problem if disk caching?
Why doesn't my server doesn't recognise more than 4GB RAM even with Physical Address Extensions under Windows Server 2003 SP2? I thought PAE should enable the server to use more RAM than 4GB but having upgraded the machine so it has 7GB RAM, Windows only sees 4GB of it. The RAM modules are all recognised by the server administrator software (2 x 2GB, 2 x 1GB and 2 x 512MB). Is there anything I can do to get it to 'see' the extra 3GB?
Thanks
A while ago I managed to create a permanent (or persistent) VPN to a remote server from my Windows 2008 server. However I can't remember how I did this and I can't find any articles explaining how you do it. I do not want to have to manually dial the connection after restarting the server - it needs to be there all the time. I remember that Windows Server 2008 has an option for this, but I can't find it within the network settings.
After resizing a C: partition I'm left with two blocks of "unallocated space". However despite the fact that neither of these blocks is a partition (they're just blank space) Windows sees them as separate blocks. I cannot see any way to combine them or to create a new partition which spans both blocks of free space. See screenshot:
