Best Practice for the Windows Time (W32TIME) Service for RDSH and VDI workloads

May 16, 2019

When using image deployment mechanisms for RDSH and VDI workloads, such as Citrix PVS, Citrix MCS and VMware View Composer, it’s extremely important to reconfigure the Windows Time (w32time) Service to ensure that the LastBootUpTime is accurate. If it’s not accurate, it effects monitoring, the correlation of log data, event triggers, etc. The default Manual […]

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XDPing PowerShell Function

May 16, 2019

I wanted to write valid PowerShell function to do an XDPing the same way Citrix do with their Health Assistant tool. I was struggling a little to get the PowerShell code working as expected, so in the end I used JetBrains decompiler to decompile the VDAAssistant.Backend.dll, which is a component of the Citrix Health Assistant Tool. This […]

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Controlling the Starting of the Citrix Desktop Service (BrokerAgent)

March 4, 2019

UPDATED 31st January 2023 Added the DefaultDomainName value to the registry, which tells this script to set the Winlogon DefaultDomainName value in the registry once the autologon process has started. This allows us to use a local account for the Autologon process instead of a Domain service account, which won’t work if the Winlogon DefaultDomainName value […]

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Repairing the HP LA2206x Monitors

January 3, 2018

Recently one of my customers was disposing some dead HP LA2206x monitors that were out of warranty. When I say “dead”, it just means that they were not powering on. As an electronics geek from the 80’s I knew it was highly probable that this is just a simple power supply issue and well within […]

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Addressing the PowerShell Garbage Collection bug

September 25, 2017

There is a known bug where PowerShell does not correctly manage a garbage collection whilst executing a pipeline or loop of an object. Simply using [System.GC]::Collect() within the pipeline or loop does not work as expected. Memory continually grows until the pipeline or loop has completed. This becomes a serious problem if you’re script is […]

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Installing, Configuring, Securing and Using MDT Webservices – Part 2

December 22, 2016

In Part 1 we walked through the installation and configuration of Deployment Webservices. In this part we will focus on securing the Webservice. There are five (5) main areas that I focus on to lock down the Webservice, and I’ll include two (2) optional areas for consideration: Use Request Filtering, which is basically what the old […]

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Installing, Configuring, Securing and Using MDT Webservices – Part 1

December 12, 2016

This will be a three part article on installing, configuring, securing and using Maik Koster’s Deployment Webservice. Part 1 – Installing and Configuring Deployment Webservices Part 2 – Securing Deployment Webservices Part 3 – Using Deployment Webservices I’m a massive fan of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) and use it for all customer deployments that don’t already have […]

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Script to modify the defaultSecurityDescriptor attribute on the Group-Policy-Container schema class object

June 29, 2016

Last week I published an article about the changes in the behavior of Group Policy processing after the deployment of security update MS16-072 under KB3163622. It included a script to assist with the remediation of Group Policy permissions: Script to report on and remediate the Group Policy security change in MS16-072. Of course that’s not where it […]

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Script to report on and remediate the Group Policy security change in MS16-072

June 22, 2016

On June 14th 2016 Microsoft released security update MS16-072 under KB3163622 that changes the behavior of Group Policy processing so that user group policies are now retrieved by using the machine’s security context instead of the user’s security context. This is a by-design behavior change from Microsoft to protect computers from a security vulnerability. Update 23/06/2016: Microsoft […]

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Netlogon parser for Message Analyzer

January 25, 2015

The Microsoft Message Analyzer is a very cool tool which helps us read and analyse a number of different log and trace file formats. In fact Message Analyzer is the replacement for the old Network Monitor (AKA Netmon) tool. Brandon Wilson from Microsoft wrote a parser for the NetLogon.log files. Here are the references to Brandon’s TechNet blogs: […]

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