Category: OS

AVMA: An easier way to activate Windows Server 2012 R2 in Hyper-V

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

Microsoft provides a new way to activate VMs hosted in Hyper-V, named Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA). It makes the activation step of VMs much easier.

Requirement:

  • Hypervisor: Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V role. Other versions are not supported. Dedicated Hyper-V Server is not supported.
  • VM: Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, Standard and Essentials.

Steps:

  1. Prepare and activate your Hypervisor;
  2. Install supported OS as VM with the key listed below, or change the key of an installed VM with command “slmgr /ipk <key>”.

Keys:

  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter: Y4TGP-NPTV9-HTC2H-7MGQ3-DV4TW
  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard: DBGBW-NPF86-BJVTX-K3WKJ-MTB6V
  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials: K2XGM-NMBT3-2R6Q8-WF2FK-P36R2

These keys are supported to being used in any unattend.exe setup file also.

 

Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303421.aspx

Remove unwanted IP addresses belong to Domain Controllers from DNS

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

If you have multiple IP addresses on domain controller and do not want to publish them all to local DNS, the original way may not help because no matter how you setup, all the interfaces can still access the DNS (localhost).

In this case, you can do this by editing the registry directly.

Open regedit.exe from Domain Controller, navigate to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNS\Parameters, add a string value, named as PublishAddresses, and set the value to the IP address which you want to be published to DNS.

Don’t forget to reboot and delete the existed unwanted records from DNS manually.

Set Windows Update to use http proxy

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

By default, Windows Update will access to microsoft update server or your WSUS server directly, no matter you set a http proxy in IE option window or not. If your computer cannot access the internet directly, that may cause a problem.

To resolve that, you need to:

  1. Set a http proxy in IE option window;
  2. Open cmd window by administrator permission;
  3. Enter this command and press enter:
    netsh winhttp import proxy source=ie

To disable the proxy setting of Windows Update, do the similars above, just changing the step 1 to disable that http proxy.

Show the System Information again in Ubuntu Server

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

Every time when I log on my ubuntu server, there always be a System Information displayed. How can we tell to the bash to re-display this screen again?

The command is: landscape-sysinfo

Simply, you just need to type land and press tab key to let the auto complete do the job.

 

Source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/7949/where-does-the-system-information-information-come-from-on-login

Remove A records of Domain Controller from DNS

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

Because it’s possible to access the DNS through all IP addresses of domain controller, you will see lots of A records pointed to each IP address of domain controller. That may cause some problem for client while determining the IP address of domain controller.

To resolve this, you have 2 choices:

1 Remove DNS service on some IP address. This will avoid the specified IP address is listed as an A record because it’s not possible to access the DNS through this IP any more.

But if you have to enable DNS on that IP, a public IP address for example, you may want to choose the 2nd way.

2 Create a REG_SZ key named PublishAddresses in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNS\Parameters, and set value to all IP addresses that you want to listed in DNS. If you need to declare multiple IP addresses, please separate them by space. Reboot when done.

Only all specified IP addresses will be displayed as A records in this way.

This function does NOT affect the failover cluster. All IP addresses belongs to cluster will still remain existed.

 

Reference: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/275554

Time Sync between OSX and Windows

~ allen ~ Leave a comment

Through Boot Camp, we can install a dedicated Windows instance with OSX in the same mac computer. Due to the different time models, you may see that the time is not right while booting into another system.

Reason:

  • OSX, as well as other unix-like system, setting UTC to hardware time, convert to local time dynamically while displaying;
  • Windows use LOCAL TIME as hardware time directly.

You may not realized this because one of these reasons below:

  • You are in England, or other countries in Time Zone 0 (GMT);
  • Your computer system, both OSX and Windows has a client of NTP, which will get the right time from internet server very soon after booting. Certainly, the related computer should have an active internet connection.

How to fix it:

I didn’t find a way to change the time model of OSX. But we can do that in Windows.

  1. Start Regedit;
  2. Nav to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation;
  3. Create a new DWORD named as RealTimeIsUniversal, and set it value to 1.