This topic describes how to use Windows Server to deploy Roaming User Profiles to Windows client computers. Roaming User Profiles redirects user profiles to a file share so that users receive the same operating system and application settings on multiple computers.

Because The join domain account is often visible in your deployment answer file (unattend.xml of sysprep.inf) during the WinPE phase, it is important that this specific account does not have any more permission, than the bare minimum.. I often experience that a domain admin account is used for this job, which is a huge security breach. When i ask why this is, the answer is normally “ we can not find the information on how to create an account with only join domain rights”.

Warning: This post is long. While working through this massive server upgrade/migration process, tears were shed, many cuss words were said, along with a general feeling of frustration, which ultimately culminated into extreme happiness once the migration was completed. The scale and complexity of the implementation factor into the length of this post, and I’ll share my thought process on how this was executed, so here goes.

This article describes how to configure Windows to automate the logon process by storing your password and other pertinent information in the registry database. By using this feature, other users can start your computer and use the account that you establish to automatically log on.

Important The autologon feature is provided as a convenience. However, this feature may be a security risk. If you set a computer for autologon, anyone who can physically obtain access to the computer can gain access to all the computer's contents, including any networks it is connected to. Additionally, when autologon is turned on, the password is stored in the registry in plain text. The specific registry key that stores this value can be remotely read by the Authenticated Users group. This setting is recommended only for cases in which the computer is physically secured and steps have been taken to make sure that untrusted users cannot remotely access the registry.

Powershell script to check windows updates using NRPE/NSClient++

Checks:

• how many critical and optional updates are available
• whether the system is waiting for reboot after installed updates
  Features:
• properly handles NRPE's 1024b limitation in return packet
• hidden updates return OK state
• Performance data in return packet shows titles of available critical updates
• caches updates in file to reduce network traffic, also dramatically increases script execution speed

Return Values for NRPE:

• No updates available - OK (0)
• Hidden Updates only - OK (0)
• Updates already installed, reboot required - WARNING (1)
• Optional updates available - WARNING (1)
• Critial updates available - CRITICAL (2)
• Script errors - UNKNOWN (3)

NSClient is an agent designed originally to work with Nagios but has since evolved into a fully fledged monitoring agent which can be used with numerous monitoring tools (like Icinga, Naemon, OP5, NetEye Opsview etc). If you want more in-depth information see the documentation instead.

In this tutorial, we will explore the conversion of Python scripts to Windows executable files in four simple steps. Although there are many ways to do it, we'll be covering, according to popular opinion, the simplest one so far.

The sane way to manage software on Windows

• Chocolatey builds on technologies you know - unattended installation and PowerShell.
  Chocolatey works with all existing software installation technologies like MSI, NSIS,
  InnoSetup, etc, but also works with runtime binaries and zip archives. Go
  Pro/Business to dial that experience up to 11!
• Easily manage all aspects of Windows software (installation, configuration, upgrade,
  and uninstallation). Chocolatey is the most reliable when software is included in the
  package, but can also easily download resources.
• Take advantage of PowerShell to provide automated software management instructions
  and Chocolatey’s built-in module to turn complex tasks into one line function calls!

Over the last few years I’ve written over forty blog posts that discuss ETW/xperf profiling. I’ve done this because it’s one of the best profilers I’ve ever used, and it’s been woefully undersold and under documented by Microsoft. My goal has been to let people know about this tool, make it easier for developers and users to record ETW traces, and to make it as easy as possible for developers to analyze ETW traces.

Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (Office 365 ATP) blocked many notable zero-day exploits in 2017. In our analysis, one activity group stood out: NEODYMIUM. This threat actor is remarkable for two reasons:

Its access to sophisticated zero-day exploits for Microsoft and Adobe software
Its use of an advanced piece of government-grade surveillance spyware FinFisher, also known as FinSpy and detected by Microsoft security products as Wingbird

FinFisher is such a complex piece of malware that, like other researchers, we had to devise special methods to crack it. We needed to do this to understand the techniques FinFisher uses to compromise and persist on a machine, and to validate the effectiveness of Office 365 ATP detonation sandbox, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP) generic detections, and other Microsoft security solutions.

This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM and that was less than half used. It has a fast SSD that was mostly idle. And yet, as I moved the mouse around it kept hitching – sometimes locking up for seconds at a time.

So I did what I always do – I grabbed an ETW trace and analyzed it. The result was the discovery of a serious process-destruction performance bug in Windows 10.

We recently announced that the entire Windows codebase is moving to a single Git repo that is hosted on Visual Studio Team Services. This migration has presented us with some very interesting scale challenges to solve, ranging from issues inherent in the Git protocol and object storage, to the performance of the git command line, to workflow challenges for a team of that size working in one repo. In this series of articles, we’ll discuss each of these scale challenges in depth, and how we have solved them to enable a team of this size to work successfully in Git.

It’s been 3 months since I first wrote about our efforts to scale Git to extremely large projects and teams with an effort we called “Git Virtual File System”. As a reminder, GVFS, together with a set of enhancements to Git, enables Git to scale to VERY large repos by virtualizing both the .git folder and the working directory. Rather than download the entire repo and checkout all the files, it dynamically downloads only the portions you need based on what you use.

Welcome on the wiki page of the only add-on for Thunderbird and Seamonkey which will add access to you Exchange calendars, contacts and Global Address List [GAL]. It is an add-on for the Lightning. Calendering Add-on and will allow you to communicate with an Exchange 2007, 2010 and 2013 server using the Exchange Web Service [EWS] interface.You can access any Calendar, Task or Contacts folder on the EWS server in an easy way. And also manage your [Out of Office] settings.