New sepago blog on SCCM (German!) My colleague Thorsten Christoffers has started blogging, mainly on topics related to Microsoft System Center. If you can read German, check out his first article on the Key Management Service […] Read more
Itanium (IA-64), an Obituary Back in the old days, when 64-bit computing was still a novel concept and RISC vs. CISC wars were still fought, HP and Intel joined forces to develop the next-generation […] Read more
Why Apple’s Shares Are Still Going Strong All the hype around Apple must have something to do with the quality of their products, it cannot be clever marketing and cool design alone. Example: Power Consumption This weekend […] Read more
Permissions: A Primer, or: DACL, SACL, Owner, SID and ACE Explained Updated: 2021-06-22 Every object that can have a security descriptor (SD) is a securable object that may be protected by permissions. All named and several unnamed Windows objects are securable […] Read more
Registry Reflection in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 x64? Gone for Good! Although the architecture of Windows x64 is still relatively young, Microsoft already changes it in Windows 7 by removing registry reflection. Just in case you wonder what I might be […] Read more
Do You Still Hide Your Share$? Fighting Another Legacy of the NT Era Hiding network shares by appending a dollar sign is a common practice among administrators. While by itself that is neither good nor bad, […] Read more
Citrix User Profile Manager: How Registry Exclusion Lists Can Mess Up Group Policy Processing The documentation of Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM, for short) recommends excluding the following registry keys from processing: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies The net effect of this is that the Citrix profiles […] Read more
How to Build a State of the Art Backup System for Your Personal Data Like most people, I have been accumulating personal data over the decades. While some of it is not too important, other pieces are priceless, especially my pictures and videos. Losing […] Read more
Mozy – Computer Upgrade / Data Migration – Lessons Learned My familiy and me generate data all the time, mostly pictures and videos. I store it all on a PC in my small home network. That PC acts as a […] Read more
Mandatory Profiles – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. A mandatory profile is a special type […] Read more
Citrix User Profile Manager: User Store Design Recommendations Citrix User Profile Manager, co-developed by sepago and Citrix, has been released. This is the first in a loose series of articles about UPM I intend to write. I will […] Read more
User Profile Design: A Primer This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. This article tries list the dos and […] Read more
MEncode.cmd Now Supports Wildcards My simple yet effective batch file-based solution for converting digital videos in Quicktime MOV format from Panasonic Lumix and other cameras to MPEG-2, MEncode.cmd, now supports wildcards, too. Now you […] Read more
How to Prevent Users from Changing Permissions on File Servers On file servers in corporate environments one typically does not want users to change permissions, even on their own files. It might seem that it would be sufficient to simply […] Read more
Internet Explorer in Protected Mode – How the Low Integrity Environment Gets Created Ever wondered what lies beneath the covers of Protected Mode Internet Explorer? Short answer, long explanation: mandatory integrity control (MIC). Read more
Enter ProfileNurse – Your Skilled Profile Care Professional User profiles can be bitchy. A single misbehaving profile is bad enough, but what if you have hundreds or thousands of them? Most admins have a boatload of profiles strewn […] Read more
Deleting User Profiles – Correctly Commenter Steven asked in response to my article on how not to delete local user profiles for the correct way to script the deletion of user profiles. Here is how. Read more
How to Reduce the Size of Roaming Profiles This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Roaming user profiles tend to grow over […] Read more
How to Convert Quicktime MOV Video Files to MPEG-2 [Update 1: Fixed bugs in the batch file and made it available for download] [Update 2: Wildcards are now supported] [Update 3: Timestamps are now copied from source to destination […] Read more
Troubleshooting User Profile Problems on Vista and Server 2008 – But How? User profile problems are among the most common support issues. It is only appropriate that Microsoft simplified the troubleshooting process over time – but forgot to port it over to […] Read more
Deleting a Local User Profile – Not as easy as one Might Assume In many environments it is a common practice to delete user profiles prior to conducting tests in order to start with a clean slate. However, this may prove more difficult […] Read more
VMware vs. Microsoft: Why Memory Overcommitment is Useful in Production and Why Microsoft Denies it In the ongoing virtualization war much has been written (pro and con) about the value of memory overcommitment, a feature VMware ESX has and Microsoft Hyper-V is lacking (XenServer, too, […] Read more
Why Disabling the Creation of 8.3 DOS File Names Will Not Improve Performance. Or Will It? It is a common practice amongst administrators to disable the creation of short filenames on NTFS. I freely admit to have recommended this in the past. Was I wrong? Background […] Read more
Choosing a Future-Proof Internal DNS Domain Name: Mission Impossible? Choosing a domain name that will only be visible from an internal network may look simple. Unfortunately, it is not. The basic problem: How to avoid collisions between the internal […] Read more
My New Book is Out: Windows Server 2008 Command Line Reference The command line is a powerful tool. Many a tedious task can be offloaded to a cleverly written script. Scripts and batch files, however, are like tool boxes without too […] Read more
How to Run Console Programs Without a Console Window From time to time the question gets asked how a batch file or console program can be executed silently or hidden, i.e. without a console window popping up. If you […] Read more
ParseCitrixLicense Now Supports XenDesktop Licenses, Too A few weeks ago I published the tool ParseCitrixLicense which displays the contents of Citrix license files in a human-readable form. The original version 1.0 did not support XenDesktop licenses, […] Read more
How to Configure Font Smoothing on Presentation Server and XenApp With the release of the hotfixes KB946633 and PSE450R02W2K3037 ClearType font smoothing is finally available on both the current and the upcoming Citrix flagship products Presentation Server 4.5 and XenApp […] Read more
Finally! Font Smoothing Over RDP/ICA on Server 2003 It took five years and probably lots of customer complaints, but finally one of the most important technologies introduced with XP/Server 2003 is available over the remoting protocols RDP and […] Read more
Corrupt User Profiles – Do They Even Exist? I will make a bold statement here: corrupt user profiles are a myth. That may seem very bold indeed, with 331,000 hits on Google for “corrupt user profile” and countless […] Read more
