Security Compliance Manager (SCM) is dead. To replace it, Microsoft has released the Security Compliance Toolkit (SCT). In this Ask the Admin, I’ll explain why SCM was killed off and how the new toolkit stacks up in comparison.
As we’ve made progress on open-source PowerShell, it’s time to start talking more in-depth about:
- different editions of PowerShell
- PowerShell’s relationship to .NET Core and .NET Standard
- the future of PowerShell
- when you might expect to start taking a dependency on PowerShell Core 6.0 in production
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in the number of high CPU/High Memory usage problems with WSUS, including WSUS in a System Center Configuration Manager environment – these have mostly corresponded with Update Tuesdays.
Source : motor1
In IIS 10.0, we introduced the IISAdministration PowerShell module which was a new way to manage IIS. This module included numerous improvements over the existing WebAdministration cmdlets.
Unfortunately, folks who hadn’t updated to Windows Server 2016 weren’t able to take advantage of the new management cmdlets until now. I’m pleased to announce that we’ve now released this module to the PowerShell Gallery and is available for use on Windows Server 2012 and above.
If you still rely on PowerShell 2.0, you should think about updating your code to work with PowerShell 5.0. Starting in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, Microsoft will no longer support PowerShell 2.0. In this Ask the Admin, I’ll discuss why PowerShell 2.0 poses a security risk and how to remove it from Windows 10.
In the wake of Adobe’s announcement about the end of life of Flash, Microsoft this week announced its own schedule for removing Flash from its own products.
If you notice that your WordPress hosting provider is not running PHP 7, but has it available to its users, you may want to consider making a WordPress PHP version change so you can benefit from all of PHP 7’s features. However, in order to avoid breaking your site, you should make sure all of your site’s themes and plugins are compatible.
To check for WordPress PHP version compatibility, you can use another simple plugin called PHP Compatibility Checker.
The WordPress core uses .htaccess for two things: Permalinks and Multisite. This means that .htaccess is only required if you have enabled either of these features. Otherwise, .htaccess is entirely optional for default WordPress installations. Beyond the WP core, many plugins also use the .htaccess file for custom directives involving rewrites, redirects, custom headers, file compression, and much more. In many cases, such plugins add their .htaccess rules to your .htaccess file automatically, behind the scenes.
So even if you haven’t enabled Permalinks or Multisite, your site may be using .htaccess rules added by WordPress plugins for various types of functionality. That’s one of the cool things about .htaccess: it can be configured and customized to improve your site’s performance, security, and usability. To help you get started, this tutorial provides a collection of .htaccess techniques that are useful for any WordPress-powered site. Combined into a blank .htaccess file, these techniques serve as a great starting point for creating your own custom .htaccess file for WordPress.
Let’s say that you have a GPO that is scoped to a specific security group. If you add a computer to this security group, you would normally need to restart in order for the computer to see that it is now a member of this group. To bypass this, you can delete the system’s Kerberos ticket and run GPUpdate. The computer will magically see its new group membership without a restart.
Hello Everyone, my name is Moni and I am a Support Engineer in the Windows Devices and Deployment team here at Microsoft. In this post, I’ll be discussing an issue where the Server Cleanup Wizard for WSUS 3.0 Service Pack 2 times out when attempting to delete computers that have not contacted the server in 30 days or more....
Details of the error are as follows:
The WSUS administration console was unable to connect to the WSUS Server Database.Verify that SQL server is running on the WSUS Server. If the problem persists, try restarting SQL.System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException — Access to table dbo.tbDownstreamServerClientSummaryRollup is blocked because the signature is not valid.Source.Net SqlClient Data ProviderStack Trace:at System.Windows.Forms.Control.MarshaledInvoke(Control caller, Delegate method, Object[] args, Boolean synchronous)at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method, Object[] args)at Microsoft.UpdateServices.UI.SnapIn.Wizards.ServerCleanup.ServerCleanupWizard.OnCleanupComplete(Object sender, PerformCleanupCompletedEventArgs e)
When Active Directory replication breaks, IT is in trouble. PowerShell comes with a few cmdlets that allow you to test if Active Directory replication is working properly.
Just Enough Administration (JEA) is a new extension in the Windows Management Framework that allows you to restrict the rights of IT admins in remote PowerShell sessions. In this first part of my JEA series, I will give an overview of the basic concepts.
Occasionally you may find that you want to start over in WSUS with a fresh database (SUSDB). There can be any number of reasons for this, but typically I see people doing this if their SUSDB is rather old, has a ton of unneeded updates in it, and maintenance has not been done on the SUSDB in years. In those cases you can find that a rebuild may be faster and easier than fixing the problematic SUSDB. Typically speaking, I see people wanting to recreate the just the content dir if they accidentally unchecked the “download update files to this server only when updates are approved” and ended up with a hard drive full of unneeded files. Whatever the reason, here are the steps for recreating the SUSDB and the WSUS Content folder for a Windows Server 2012 based WSUS computer
In this article, I'll show you how to create a tool in PowerShell that will allow you to update multiple SQL servers in one swath with a single command.
The ProblemSource : IEInternals
From time to time, various users have complained to the IE team that they’re unable to log into assorted websites and services that they care about: Hotmail and GMail are two common examples. They report that after entering their credentials into the login page, the page seems to get caught in some sort of redirect loop, redirecting from the login page to the site back to the login page. This pattern either continues endlessly or until an error message is displayed.
The Security Compliance Manager (SCM) is a free tool from Microsoft that enables you to quickly configure, and manage the computers in your environment using Group Policy and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. This version of SCM supports Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016.
LGPO.exe is a command-line utility to automate the management of local group policy objects (LGPO). Version 1.0 was released last January. The PRE-RELEASE LGPO.exe v2.0 is attached to this blog post, and adds support for Multiple Local Group Policy Objects (MLGPO) and 64-bit REG_QWORD registry values. It also adds support for /e mnemonic options to enable the GP client side extensions for LAPS, Credential Guard, and Device Guard.
As you may have seen, there has been an update to the extended support lifecycle for WSUS 3.0 SP2 (WSUS 3.2). We received feedback that ending this product’s life in July 2017 would cause a significant disruption for those Windows Server 2008/R2 deployments that planned to rely upon it until January 2020. As such, the end of life for this product is now January 2020.
Don't waste your time trying to understand what this blog is about or why is there so many unrelated news in it (from Formula 1 to computer programming). It's simply my own personal blog where I can put any information I like.
