This post describes how I upgraded our webserver running WordPress on Apache from Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS to 16.04.1 LTS. Please see this article for more information on the server’s installation and configuration.

Update: KB4022723 seems to fix the black lock screen issue described in this article. The Spotlight feature of Windows 10 shows beautiful images on the lock screen. Annoyingly, it appears to be broken on many machines, showing a black screen instead of a pretty photograph. Read on for the cause and a workaround.

Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is the current name for a new type of application platform originally introduced with Windows 8 as “Metro” and later renamed to “Modern”. UWP apps can run on desktop, phone and console versions of Windows. They may only use a subset of the Windows API and run in a sandboxed environment. As a consequence, UWP apps can only use very limited areas of the file system. This article describes where UWP app settings are stored and how part of those settings roam between devices.

User accounts created in Azure AD are subject to Azure AD’s password policies and restrictions, whose defaults are far from optimal. Unfortunately, the most severe shortcomings cannot currently be changed.

I am happy to announce that my tools Delprof2 and SetACL Studio are now free to use, both for individuals and corporations. Previously, Delprof2 was only free to use commercially if an organization allowed us to use their name in our marketing. SetACL Studio was not available for free at all.

When it comes to selecting a general-purpose workstation I tend to be looking for the impossible: high performance, superb reliability, quiet operation, moderate price. Amazingly, there exists at least one device with all those qualities: the Fujitsu Celsius J550.

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 alternative.

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 use often. In selecting what to include I focused on shortcuts that might be less well known. Many shortcuts work in other than the described applications in a very similar way. Please do try them out in all your most frequently used applications.

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, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. To make things more interesting I tested GPU performance on Nvdia and Intel.

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 PCs and VDI machines to authoring ADM/ADMX/ADML files. Last year I presented and wrote a very detailed analysis of the impact of Group Policy on user logon performance (blog posts). Along the way I learned a lot about the strengths but also about the weaknesses of Group Policy. This article is an account of the latter.

The Lenovo Yoga 900 packs some amazing hardware in an ultraportable 1.29 kg 13" chassis: high-resolution 3200x1800 screen, Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, 16 GB RAM. The only downsides I found so far: glossy display, maximum SSD size is 512 GB, OS is Windows Home, not Pro. There is not much we can do about the former, but we can change latter two pretty easily. This article explains how to upgrade the SSD and install a clean Windows 10 Pro without any Lenovo bloatware.

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 machine. The interesting part: every second time, loading the roaming profile would fail - causing a 35 second logon delay. Every other time, it would work.

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 for virtualization as it combines a fast CPU with a good amount of RAM and SSD storage - at a price point of less than €60 per month. Another cool thing: Hetzner lets you install your own operating system. Here’s how.

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 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

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 in production!

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 soon.

When sizing a new environment it is tempting to use averages. It seems the logical thing to do. But it also guarantees a bad user experience. Example: Sizing an RDS or XenApp Farm Let’s say you’re tasked with building a new Citrix XenApp farm. Being a diligent IT person you set up a pilot: one or two machines with all the right software and settings. Then you carefully select a group of pilot users in such a way that they represent the organization’s employee types statistically correctly. Then you let them work on the new platform, ironing out bugs and such. At the end of that period, you have a great new platform. But there is one big question left: how many servers to buy?!

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 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

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 disks you will find that the VHDX files backing the virtual disks always grow in size, they never shrink. Eventually this becomes a problem either directly because of increased storage requirements or indirectly because backups take longer. Compacting VHDX files is possible but more complicated than I feel it should be. I have described the process for Windows VMs here. This article shows how to do it for Ubuntu Linux VMs.

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 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

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 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state.

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 first.

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 the Hood HPAS Population The high-performance analytics store (HPAS) is populated by scheduled searches that run every 5 minutes. The HPAS spans a user-defined time range. Old events are purged automatically by a maintenance process that runs every 30 minutes.

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 is great and very fast with needle in a haystack searches, e.g. find a specific keyword in millions of events. It is not so fast with searches that perform calculations on millions of events, e.g. the sum or average of fields.