Category Archives: Windows

Windows 2003? Let it go!

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Reflecting on some of the discussions I was in recently I can only say that there is no escaping reality. Here are some reference blogs for you.

You can’t get of Windows 2003 you say? Held hostage by ancient software from a previous century?  Sure I understand your problems and perils. But we do not negotiate with hostage takers. We get rid of them. Be realistic, do you think this is somehow going to get any better with age? What in 24 months? What about 48? You get the drift. What’s bad now will only be horrible in x amount of time.

Look at some issues people run into already:

Issues like this are not going to go away, new ones will pop up. Are you going to keep everything in your infrastructure frozen in time to try an avoid these? That’s not even coping, that’s suffering.

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What ever it is that’s blocking you, tomorrow is when you start planning to deal with it and execute on that plan. Don’t be paralyzed by fear or indecision. Over 12 years it will have been a supported OS by its end of life. Windows 2003 had a real good run but now it’s over. Let it go before it hurts you. You have no added value from a more recent version of Windows? Really? We need to talk, seriously.

UPDATE: Inspired by Aidan Finn (@joe_elway) who offered a very good picture to get the message across => click the picture to get the soundtrack! LET IT GO!

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Failed at dumping XP in a timely fashion? Reassert yourself by doing better with Windows Server 2003!

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I could write a blog post that repeats the things I said bout XP here for Windows 2003 with even some more drama attached so I won’t. There’s plenty about that on the internet and you can always read these blogs again:

I also refer you to a old tweet of mine that got picked up by some one and he kind of agreed:

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Replace “XP” with “Server 2003” and voila. Instant insight into the situation. You are blocking yourself from moving ahead and it getting worse by the day. All IT systems & solutions rot over time. They become an ever bigger problem to manage and maintain, costing you time, effort, money and lost opportunities due to blocking to progress. There comes a day that creative solutions won’t pop up anymore like the one in this blog post  Windows XP Clients Cannot Execute Logon Scripts against a Windows Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller – Workaround and more recently this on where people just waited to long to move AD over from Windows Server 2003 to something more recent It turns out that weird things can happen when you mix Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controllers. All situations where not moving ahead out of fear to break stuff actually broke the stuff.

In the environments I manage I look at the technology stack and plan the technologies that will be upgraded in the coming 12 months in the context of what needs to happen to support & sustain initiatives. This has the advantage that the delta between versions & technologies can never become to big. It avoids risk because it doesn’t let delta grow for 10 years an blocks introducing “solutions” that only supports old technology stacks. It make sure you never fall behind too much, pay off existing technology debt in a timely fashion and opens up opportunities & possibilities. That’s why our AD is running Windows Server 2012 R2 and our ADFS was moved to 3.0 already. It’s not because a lot of things have become commodities you should hand ‘m over to the janitor in break/fix mode. Oh the simplicity by which some wander this earth …

OODA

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Right now in 2014 we’ve given management and  every product/application owner their marching orders. Move away from any Windows 2008 / R2 server that is still in production. Why? They demand a modern capable infrastructure that can deliver what’s needed to grasp opportunities that exits with current technology. In return they cannot allow apps to block this. It’s as easy and simple as that. And we’ll stick to the 80/20 rule to call it successful and up the effort next year for the remainder. Whether it’s an informal group of dedicated IT staff or a full blown ITIL process that delivers that  doesn’t matter. It’s about the result and if I still see Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 being rolled out as a standard I look deeper and often find a slew of Windows 2003 or even Windows 2000 servers, hopefully virtualized by now. But what does this mean? That you’re in a very reactive modus & in a bad place. Courage & plans are what’s needed. Combine this with skills to deal with the fact that no plan ever woks out perfectly. Or as Mike Tyson said “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. … Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.”

Organizations that still run XP and Windows Server 2003 are paralyzed by fear & have frozen even before they got hit. Hiding behind whatever process or methodology they can (or the abuse of it) to avoid failure by doing the absolute minimum for the least possible cost. Somehow they define that as success and it became a mission statement. If you messed up with XP, there’s very little time left to redeem yourself and avoid the same shameful situation with Windows Server 2003. What are you waiting for? Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

NTFS Permissions On A File Server From Hell Saved By SetACL.exe & SetACL Studio

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Most IT people don’t have a warm and fuzzy feeling when NTFS permissions & “ACLing” are being discussed. While you can do great & very functional things with it, in reality when dealing with file servers over time “stuff” happens. Some of it technical, most of it is what I’ll call “real life”. When it comes to file servers, real life, especially in a business environment, has very little respect, let alone consideration for NFTS/ACL best practices. So we all end up dealing with the fall out of this phenomena. If you haven’t I could state you’re not a real sys admin but in reality I’m just envious of your avoidance skills Smile.

You don’t want to fight NTFS/ACLs, but if it can’t be avoided you need the best possible knowledge about how it works and the best possible tools to get the job done (in that order).

If you have not heard of SetACL or DelProf2, you might also not have heard of uberAgent for Splunk, let alone of their creator, community rock star Helge Klein. If you new to the business I’ll forgive you but if you been around for a while you have to get to know these tools. His admin tools, both the free or the paying ones, are rock solid and come in extremely handy in day to day work. When the shit hits the fans they are priceless.

Helge is an extremely knowledgeable, experienced, talented and creative IT Professional and developer. I’ve met him a couple of times (E2EVC, where he’s an appreciated speaker) and all I can say is that on top of all that, he’s a great guy, with heart for the community.

Having the free SetACL.exe available for scripting of NTFS permissions is a luxury I cannot do without anymore. On top of that for a very low price you can buy SetACL Studio. This must be the most efficient GUI tool for managing NFTS permissions / ACLs I have ever come across.

Not long ago I was faced with a MBR to GPT LUN migration on a very large file server. It’s the proverbial file server from hell. We’ve all been there too many times and even after 15 years plus we still cannot get people to listen and follow some best practices and above all the KISS principle. So you end up having to deal with the fall out of every political, organizational, process and technical mistake you can imagine when it comes to ACLs & NTFS permissions. So what did I reach for? SetACL.exe and SetACL Studio, these are my go to tools for this.

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Check out the web page to read up on what this tool can do for you. It very easy to use, intuitive and fast. It can do ACL on file systems, registry, services, printers and even WMI. It helps you deal with granting ownership and rights without messing up the existing NTFS permissions in an easy way. It works on both local and remote systems. Last but not least it has an undo function, how cool is that?!  Yup and admin tool that let you change your mind. Quite unique.

As an MVP I can get a license for free form Helge Klein but I recommend any IT Pro or consultant to buy this tool as it makes a wonderful addition to anyone’s toolkit, saving countless of hours, perhaps even days. It pays itself back within the 15 minutes you use it.

Other useful tools in your toolkit are http://www.editpadlite.com/ as it can handle the large (550-800 MB) log files RoboCopy can produce and some PowerShell scripting skills to parse these files.

Windows XP Clients Cannot Execute Logon Scripts against a Windows Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller – Workaround

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The issue

The real issue is that you are still running Windows XP. The secondary issue is that you have Windows XP clients that cannot connect to a file share (NETLOGON) on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Domain Controller. If you try manually via \domaincontrollerNetlogon it will throw an error like  "The specified network name is no longer available".  Security wise & moral pressure wise I kind of think this drives home the message you need to get off Windows XP. But I realize you’re in a pickle so here’s the workaround/fix.

Root Cause & Fix

Windows XP talks SMB 1.0 and that’s it. If this is not offered by the server (file server or domain controller) we have a problem. Now if you installed new Windows Server 2012 R2 servers they do not deploy the SMB 1.0 feature by default. If you upgraded from Windows 2008 R2 (perhaps even over Windows 2012) to get to Windows 2008 (R2) this feature kept in place. Other wise you’ll need to make sure SMB 1.0 is installed, it often (always?) is. Just check.

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However there is a big change between Windows Server 2008 R2/Windows 2012. The LanmanServer service has a dependency set to SMB 2.0 and no longer to SMB 1.0

This is what it looks like on a Windows Server 2012 (or lower) domain controller:

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This is what it look like on a Windows Server 2012 domain controller

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So we need to change that on Windows 2012 R2 to support Windows XP. We can do this in the registry. Navigate to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanServerDependOnService

  1. Change SamSS Srv2 to SamSS Srvimage
  2. Restart the Server (Lanmanserver) service (it will restart the dependent services like netlogon, DFS Namespace, .. as well)

You’re XP clients should be able to authenticate again. You can test this by navigating to \domaincontrollerNetlogon on a XP client. This should succeed again.

If you have issues with Windows Server 2012 R2 file servers … this is also valid. When you do get rid of Windows XP. Go back to the original settings please Smile.

If you want to read more on SMB read this blog Windows Server 2012 R2: Which version of the SMB protocol (SMB 1.0, SMB 2.0, SMB 2.1, SMB 3.0 or SMB 3.02) are you using? by Jose Barreto (File Server team at Microsoft)

Finally, get off XP!

I think I said it enough on twitter and my blog Legacy Apps Preventing Your Move From Windows XP to Windows 8.1? Are you worried about HeartBleed? Good! Are you worried about still being on XP? No? Well dump SSL and use clear text authentication as XP is a free fire zone  anyway (as of April 8th 2014) and it’s just a matter of time before you’re road kill. Any company who has CIO/CTO/IT managers and other well paid functions and have let their organization be held hostage on XP (I’m not talking about a few PCs or VMs left and right) by legacy apps & ISV should realize they are the one who let this happen. Your watch. Your responsibility. No excuses.