Helge Klein • Page 3 of 14 • Tools & knowledge for IT pros

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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!

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.

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). […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Extracting all Email Addresses from a Gmail Label

As with any other product, when working with Gmail / Google Apps you sometimes get to a point where you want something the product simply does not provide. When that […]

VMware vExpert Award

VMware recognized my contributions to the virtualization community by awarding me their vExpert title. Many thanks to everybody who made that possible, the readers of this blog, the attendees of […]

Creating Realistic Test User Accounts in Active Directory

When you need to simulate a real Active Directory with thousands of users you quickly find that creating realistic test accounts is not trivial. Sure enough, you can whip up […]

Thoughts on Cloud File Synchronization Security

As the Box IPO shows enterprise cloud file synchronization & sharing (EFSS) is a hot topic. Yet the hottest vendors do not “get” security.

Upcoming uberAgent Webinars in English and German

uberAgent is the perfect monitoring and analysis tool for virtualized and physical Windows workloads. In a nutshell it tells you what is going on and why things are slow. Seeing […]

Windows Keyboard Mapping with SharpKeys

Or: Getting rid of Caps Lock & creating the missing context menu key I like my current laptop, a Lenovo W540, but details of the keyboard layout really deteriorate the […]

Turning Splunk into a Systems Management Tool

Despite its great power, Splunk is relatively static with regards to the data it processes. You cannot instruct it to simply run a script on all endpoints and index the […]

Switching a WordPress Site From HTTP to HTTPS

Using SSL for the entire website should be the norm these days. If you have a decent server it does not significantly reduce page speed and it allegedly even helps […]

How to Enable BitLocker Hardware Encryption with SSDs

2019-10-01: with the 2019 September update KB4516045 BitLocker uses software instead of hardware encryption by default. Likely reason: the security of software encryption can be controlled by Microsoft. Hardware encryption […]