Faster Trimming & Compacting of Hyper-V Ubuntu VMs A while ago I described how to compact an Ubuntu VHDX running on Hyper-V using the sfill command. Running sfill, however, can take hours. Luckily, there is a much faster […] Read more
Keyboard Shortcuts You’ll Never Want to Miss Again Keyboard shortcuts are the key to productivity and efficiency. This is true for any machine, any OS and any application. This article lists shortcuts I personally find very helpful and […] Read more
Comparison: CPU & GPU Usage of 4 Browsers How do popular browsers differ in compute footprint when running animations? In this article I am comparing the CPU as well as the GPU utilization of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, […] Read more
What’s Wrong with Group Policy Over the years I have worked with Group Policy in many different ways. My experience ranges from helping an enterprise client establish a brand new set of policies for physical […] Read more
Lenovo Yoga 900: SSD Upgrade & Clean Windows Installation The Lenovo Yoga 900 packs some amazing hardware in an ultraportable 1.29 kg 13″ chassis: high-resolution 3200×1800 screen, Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, 16 GB RAM. The only downsides I found […] Read more
Windows 10 Roaming Profile: Sharing Violation Every 2nd Logon I came across this problem while preparing my sessions for this year’s conferences. The setup is boringly simple: a user with a roaming profile logging on to a Windows 10 […] Read more
Hyper-V on Hetzner’s EX51 Hosted Dedicated Servers Your low-cost high-performance cloud data center building block. This guide explains how to install Windows Server 2012 R2 on Hetzner’s EX51-SSD dedicated servers. That line of servers is very attractive […] Read more
How Group Policy Impacts Logon Performance #4: Citrix Policies This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the fourth in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 […] Read more
VMware Horizon in a Lab: Getting Rid of SSL Errors This is a description of a quick and dirty way to get SSL to work correctly in a VMware Horizon View installation in a lab environment. Do not do this […] Read more
Microsoft Windows Enterprise State Roaming – First Thoughts Microsoft just announced a new service called Enterprise State Roaming. The broader goal seems to be to replace roaming user profiles. That, however, is not going to happen any time […] Read more
Why Sizing for Averages is a Bad Idea When sizing a new environment it is tempting to use averages. It seems the logical thing to do. But is also guarantees a bad user experience. Example: Sizing an RDS […] Read more
How Group Policy Impacts Logon Performance #3: WMI Filters & ILT This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the third in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 […] Read more
Compacting Hyper-V VHDX Files of Ubuntu Linux VMs Note: if your guest OS supports the trim command you can use the faster method described in this article. If you configured your Hyper-V virtual machines with dynamically expanding virtual […] Read more
How Group Policy Impacts Logon Performance #2: Internals This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the second in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 […] Read more
How Group Policy Impacts Logon Performance #1: CSEs This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the first in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 […] Read more
Splunk Accelerated Data Models – Part 3 This article is based on my Splunk .conf 2015 session and is the second in a mini-series on Splunk data model acceleration. Make sure to read parts 1 and 2 […] Read more
Splunk Accelerated Data Models – Part 2 This article is based on my Splunk .conf 2015 session and is the second in a mini-series on Splunk data model acceleration. Make sure to read part 1 first. Under […] Read more
Splunk Accelerated Data Models – Part 1 This article is based on my Splunk .conf 2015 session and is the first in a mini-series on Splunk data model acceleration. Why Accelerate? Have you ever seen this? Splunk […] Read more
Citrix Synergy 2016 Call for Topics: Get Rid of the Video Requirement (Open Letter) It smacks of lazy reviewers looking for eye-candy. Simon Crosby, former Citrix CTO Citrix Synergy Team, I am writing to you as a guy who has presented many times at […] Read more
Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop API Hooking Explained What is API Hooking? API hooking is all about making others do things they never even knew they could do. More precisely: tricking other processes into doing things differently from […] Read more
Performance Footprint of PowerShell Logon Scripts PowerShell is a popular and extremely versatile tool, but is it a good idea to use PowerShell in logon scripts? Let’s try to find out! Read more
FileIOTest – Times the Duration of File IO Operations FileIOTest is a command line tool that tests the speed of local or remote (SMB) storage by performing some common file IO operations repeatedly and measuring the duration. Read more
Converting Mercurial Repositories to Git on Windows If you work with text, you need version control. That rule applies regardless of whether you write code or poetry (some might argue that those two are the same, anyway). […] Read more
Recursively Setting Directory Attributes in PowerShell As I found out the (excellent) Egnyte Desktop Sync client for Windows ignores directories that have the system attribute set. For some reason some of the directories I wanted to […] Read more
All You (N)ever Wanted to Know about Logon & Group Policy Performance Citrix Synergy, E2EVC and BriForum are just around the corner. I will be presenting at each of these conferences. Here are a few tidbits to whet your appetite. Read more
Citrix Desktop Viewer Screen Resolution and Window Size As far as I know there is no “official” way to set the width, height and screen position of Citrix Desktop Viewer in window mode. It can be done easily […] Read more
Citrix XenApp 7.6 Logon Slow – Long Black Screen Phase Update 2015-04-28: Citrix provides the limited release hotfix ICATS760WX64009 that fixes this issue. More information below. During the research for my session about the XenApp 7.6 logon process, to be […] Read more
What’s New in uberAgent 3.0 One of the (many) great things about Splunk is that data, once indexed, is not being tampered with. Of course you can choose for how long you want to retain […] Read more
Splunk Scripted Input Secrets Splunk’s Universal Forward has the neat capability of executing arbitrary scripts while capturing their output and sending that to Splunk. This feature allows you to turn any executable, batch file […] Read more
Manual Folder Redirection with Symbolic Links This is a guest post by Bryan Chriscoli, who implemented an innovative alternative to folder redirection with the help of symbolic links, AppSense products and PowerShell scripting. All credit goes […] Read more
