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Tag: Windows Server

Creating a Sysprepped Windows Server 2012 image

Creating a Sysprepped Windows Server 2012 image

One of the advantages to running Windows Server 2012 is the highly improved Hyper-V engine. In my time working on deployment scenarios I have found that creating a reliable baseline VM is critical to my success in getting farms deployed quickly and easily. To this end I have found that getting a new VM server with the OS installed to the correct level with patches, the SharePoint prerequisites, and all of the customizations that I like to have on a…

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How to: Activate Desktop Experience in Windows Server 2012

How to: Activate Desktop Experience in Windows Server 2012

I ran into an issue where I needed to active that Desktop Experience in on Windows Server 2012 and found that it was not in the same place that I was expecting it to be from previous versions. Figured that this might help some people. Desktop Experience is required to be running if you are going to utilize OneNote, which when working in a demo server environment can be very useful. There are some DLLs that are not accessible unless…

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How to disable Shutdown Event Tracker in Windows Server 2008 R2

How to disable Shutdown Event Tracker in Windows Server 2008 R2

Scenario: You have people in your office, you are in the middle of work in 2 different Dev VMs plus Visual Studio on your host or you are working on several servers plus your local Dev VM while writing admin scripts (making this viable for Admin and Dev types alike).  Time for a reboot of your Dev VM so you click on reboot and flip back to your other work and figure you will check back in 10 minutes once…

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How to: Fix the "Unable to access SharePoint sites from the localhost" problem

How to: Fix the "Unable to access SharePoint sites from the localhost" problem

Ever try to access a page on your SharePoint site from your web front end only to get prompted for a login that never lets you through? The issue happens when dealing with sites that Integrated Authentication and have names that are mapped to the loopback address.  Translation:  if you are using Windows with Claims or Classic Mode web applications  and you are trying to connect from the server, this is you. The LoopbackCheck security feature is enabled by default…

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Random Server hang issues result in a required hard reset

Random Server hang issues result in a required hard reset

Symptom: Windows 2008 R2 64bit systems hang at random and require a hard reboot of the system to recover. You can remote to the system via KVM (RDP is not accessible) and even do a CTRL+ALT+DEL, but after the lock screen goes away and tries to give you a login screen… YOU GET NOTHING. Only silence… Root Cause: We ended up with a three headed root cause on this set of issues. 1.) Our blades had a bad BIOS version…

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