Artifact Weblog

Was configuring WSUS on a Server 2016 VM for a customer recently and found the performance to be very sluggish and most of the time the client PCs would time-out and throw an error message when trying to check for updates. After much digging on different forums I came across a fix that worked nicely: Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and click on Application Pools Then Right-Click on your WsusPool instance and choose Advanced Settings Scroll down to Private Memory Limit (KB) and change it from the default of 1843200 to 0 which means unlimited. Then right-click and stop the WsusPool and then start it again. Hope this works for you.

​Was installing  APC PowerChute Network Shutdown (PCNS) on a customer’s server and couldn’t find a record of the Authentication Passphrase that I set ages back on their Smart UPSes Network Management 2 Card. So I went to reset it on the card and start anew… it took a lot of digging to find it on their particular release of firmware: Go into the UPS tab, then into “shutdown” inside the “Configuration” category: You may then need to change the passphrase being used on other servers. To do this, open up PCNS in your browser and click into the area shown below:

Windows 10 no longer creates a "WindowsUpdate.log" file in %WINDIR% like it used to. It creates ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) traces which aren't viewable in a text editor. The solution is to run the Get-WindowsUpdateLog command from PowerShell. This creates a WindowsUpdate.log and, by default, places it on the Desktop. This can then be opened in Notepad.

Issue: I recently noticed that I was unable to login to a customer's SonicWALL TZ-210 over HTTPS using Google Chrome.  HTTP was fine but attempting login with HTTPS gave the following error message: ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH Clicking on "Details" revealed the following additional information: A secure connection cannot be established because this site uses an unsupported protocol or cipher suite. This is likely to be caused when the server needs RC4, which is no longer considered secure. Cause: This was due to two issues: Google Chrome no longer supporting RC4 encryption for HTTPS which the customer's SonicWALL was obviously using. The customer's SonicWALL using RC4 encryption for its HTTPS sessions rather than a more secure protocol. Fix: There's already an excellent fix for this issue on Spiceworks: https://community.spiceworks.com/posts/6260617

I got a set of worried messages from a customer of mine recently who had fired up Microsoft Word and proceeded to create a document without saving it.  After spending hours on it they then shut down their PC and accidentally clicked on the option to to not save the document.  Was there a way to get it back? After a little bit of digging I found the answer.  There are two ways to resolve this: 1. Quicker, slightly more techie method: -  Open a Windows Explorer window and browse to the following location: -  c:\users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles -  There should be a file or files with the ASD extension.  One of these will hopefully be the file you are missing. -  Double-click to check and see - the files should open up with Word. 2. Slower but less techie method: -  Open up Microsoft Word and just click on a Blank Document template to get started. -  Click on the File menu and then click Info -  Click on Manage Document -  Click Recover Unsaved Documents -

 Microsoft's RichCopy is a fantastic tool for copying/moving files.  It's multithreaded so moves things along quicker and has a nice log so you can see what's working and what's going wrong. It's kind of like a GUI on top of RoboCopy and you can get it here... However, I always forget that it doesn't copy file/folder NTFS permissions by default.  This is what you need to do if you want permissions to copy across to the destination: - Click the "View" menu and then click on "Advanced". - Then click the "Option" button on the right below the "Source" and "Destination" buttons. - Click on "File attributes, Error Handling" - Tick the relevant boxes under the "Security information" section. Hope this helps.