New KB Articles on User Profiles (April to May 2009) This is a collection of new knowledge base articles related to Windows user profiles. As you can see, the last two months were pretty quiet. So quiet, that you may […] Read more
Folder De-Localization with Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) Windows user profiles prior to Vista / Server 2008 contain localized folder names. End users expect that, of course, but admins tend to hate it because automated management becomes much […] Read more
File Copy Performance to USB Drive Oscillating Between Fast and Slow I just had the “pleasure” of having to copy the contents of a terabyte USB disk to another similar USB drive. At first, I did not give this simple task […] Read more
Hard Links and Permissions / ACLs Commenter Lee asked how ACLs are evaluated when an object has multiple hard links. I replied with comments of my own, which turned out to be wrong after I did […] Read more
Cleaning up the Mess Left Behind by Multiple EFS Certificates In case you have (un?)wittingly been juggling around with multiple EFS certificates like me, you may feel a strong urge to clean up the mess. Which mess? It can happen […] Read more
Tales from the Crypt – EFS and the Upgrade to Windows 7 RC How can you mess up a simple OS upgrade by using encryption? Simple. Here is what happened to me when I upgraded my Windows 7 beta system to the RC […] Read more
How to Find and List Unsigned Executable Files Executable files can (and should be!) digitally signed. Without a digital signature you can never be sure the files on your hard disk have not been tampered with. There is […] Read more
Is VMware Clustering / VMotion Complex Compared to Microsoft Failover Clustering? My last post on VMware VMotion urged several readers to protest, maybe because of its provocative title. What I did was to compare VMware clustering with Microsoft failover clustering. I […] Read more
You’ll Know Me by My Shirt at Citrix iForum / Synergy / Summit 2009 I will be attending the combined Citrix events iForum, Synergy and Summit 2009 in Las Vegas, which start in just a few days. As always, I hope to meet great […] Read more
VMotion Is Hyped by Consultants, But Do Admins Even Use It? Some time ago I attended a presentation by a former VMware, now Microsoft employee who claimed that Hyper-V’s lack of Live Migration aka VMotion is not relevant at all. According […] Read more
Hard Links, Soft (Symbolic) Links and Junctions in NTFS: What Are They (For)? This is an attempt at demystification. In the Windows world, links in the file system are often regarded as obscure, except for the infamous .LNK files, of course. But file […] Read more
User Profile and Home Directory Storage: Distributing the Load Across Multiple File Servers This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. The easiest way to assign user profile […] Read more
Printer Driver Isolation in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 If you are not tired of print spooler crashes then this article is not for you. If you are, you may find a new feature of the upcoming next version […] Read more
Microsoft Tackles the "Last Writer Wins" Problem of Roaming Profiles in Windows 7 & Server 2008 R2 Among the more annoying deficiencies of roaming user profiles in terminal server farms is what came to be known as “last writer wins”. It looks like Microsoft is trying to […] Read more
New Articles on User Profiles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (March 2009) This is a collection of new MS KB articles related to Windows user profiles. Read more
Eating Microsoft's Dog Food – A Self-Experiment With Windows 7, Part 3: Usage In the previous article of this mini-series I described how to install Windows 7 x64 beta 1 into a virtual hard disk (VHD) file. In this post I will share […] Read more
Eating Microsoft's Dog Food – A Self-Experiment With Windows 7, Part 2: Installation In the first article of this mini-series I described how I prepared my work laptop for the installation of Windows 7 x64 beta 1 into a virtual hard disk (VHD) […] Read more
Eating Microsoft's Dog Food – A Self-Experiment With Windows 7, Part 1: Preparation After reading a lot about the speed and stability of Windows 7 (beta 1), I decided it was time for me not only to use it for real work, but […] Read more
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
