Setting ACLs on Website directories using PowerShell

One of the extremely common tasks I have to perform whenever I set up a website or virtual directory/application in IIS is that I have to also set up folder/directory permissions on the newly created directory as well.

This can be time consuming and error prone, especially if you have to set up numerous directories either on a single web server or multiple web servers.

That is why I heavily rely on PowerShell to help me accomplish this task!

For a primer on just how to accomplish this using PowerShell, you can check out this article: http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/powershell-manage-file-system-acl,2-837.html

Of course, my needs are targeted towards IIS website directories in particular, so I have modified the original script to suit my needs.

You can check out my version of the PowerShell script:

A specified logon session does not exist in Windows 10

I was recently helping a friend with his Windows 10 machine to connect to his network NAS device and I encountered this error message:

"The mapped network drive could not be created because the following error has occurred:
A specified logon session does not exist. It may already have been terminated."

This was incredibly odd since he stated that it had been working fine just a few weeks earlier!

Well, after a quick search on the Internet, I came across this posting: http://superuser.com/questions/968879/windows-10-map-network-drive-a-specified-logon-session-does-not-exist

According to the posting, it stated that a Windows update changed the behavior of Windows 10 causing standard connectivity to network devices such as NAS devices using a guest account would require special setup through Credential Manager!

Here are the steps I followed to get this up and running:

I opened Credential Manager from the Windows Control Panel:

I then clicked on "Windows Credentials":

I then clicked on the link for "Add a Windows credential"

I then proceeded to enter the credentials for my network device in the format \\MYNASDEVICE

When I next connected to my friend's NAS device simply using \\MYNASDEVICE in Windows Explorer, it opened without any issues!  Hurrah!!

Set up Docker containers on Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016

If you want to get started using Docker for either Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016, you can follow these quick start guides on how to set up Docker containers for each of these respective platforms:

Windows Containers on Windows 10
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/quick_start_windows_10

Windows Containers on Windows Serverhttps://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/quick_start_windows_server

Windows 10 Licensed Virtual Machines available for download!

In the past whenever you have wanted to download a Windows Virtual Machine from Microsoft, you would only be able to download an evaluation virtual machine that would expire after a certain period of time.

Of course, for those developers that wanted a non-expiring virtual machine they could immediately download and license, this was a bit frustrating.

Thankfully, though, Microsoft listened to its user feedback and is now offering licensed Windows 10 Pro virtual machines!

You can read more about these Windows 10 Pro Virtual Machines here: https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2016/09/30/just-released-windows-developer-virtual-machines-september-2016-build/#6eQPtyU0dF6M78Qq.97

You can then download the licensed Windows 10 Pro Virtual Machines from here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines

Installing Telnet Client from PowerShell

If you need to install the Telnet Client, you can either install it from using the Server Manager GUI or you can install it directly from PowerShell!

I, personally prefer PowerShell since it is much quicker than going through the wizards in Server Manager.

If you want to install Telnet Client from ANY client OS or server OS, you can run the following command:


However, if you wish to install PowerShell on a server OS, you can run the following command:

Installing Oracle Client 12c on Windows 10

If you need to work with Oracle on your development machine, at some point in time, you are going to need to install the Oracle client on your machine.

Fortunately, if you install newer versions of Oracle clients, they will usually remain backwards-compatible with older versions of Oracle server.  For example, you can STILL install and Oracle 12c client while working with an Oracle 11g R2 database!

Without further ado, below you can find the steps to install Oracle Client 12c on your Windows 10 system:

For whatever reason, Oracle does not ship with necessary Visual C++ Prerequisites with its installer, so you will have to also separately install the Visual C++ Redistributable.

Otherwise, you may end up with errors such as the following when attempting to set up your ODBC DSNs for Oracle:

Based on the Oracle Pre-installation requirements, you can install a number of Visual C++ installers on your system ranging from Visual C++ 2010, to 2012 to Visual C++ 2013: http://docs.oracle.com/database/121/NTCLI/pre_install.htm#NTCLI1257

However, in my experience, the ONLY version of Visual C++ I was able to get to work on my machine was Visual C++ 2010 which you can download from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5555

NOTE: If you are installing the 32-bit Oracle Client, then you will need to install the Visual C++ x86 installation and likewise if you are installing the 64-bit Oracle Client, you will need to install the Visual C++ x64 installation.

Pinging an IPv4 Network Address

Now that most Windows machines have IPv6 installed by default, I have noticed that when you do a ping of a machine, you will get the IPv6 address instead of the IPv4 address!!

Well, I still prefer reading and remembering the IPv4 addresses, so I wanted to find out how to get the IPv4 address instead when I performed a ping.

Thankfully, it was rather easy to accomplish as follows:

ping MYSERVER -4

That was all that was needed to return the IPv4 address!

If I still want to get the IPv6 address, I can get it by just changing the command to this instead:

ping MYSERVER -6

How simple is that??

Run Visual Studio as Administrator by default

If you work with Visual Studio and your local IIS instance, you may soon discover that you are unable to load any projects in your solution that are bound to your local IIS instance!

This is because Visual Studio is set to default to using IIS Express which requires lower privileges than projects bound to your local IIS instance.

In order to resolve this problem, you simply need to right-click on your Visual Studio icon and select "Run as administrator" each time before you launch the application.

However, if you use Visual Studio every day, you can see how performing this operation over and over again can be tedious and annoying.

But if you know this handy tip, you can launch Visual Studio with Administrative privileges by default each time!

For this example, I am using Visual Studio 2015, but this can be equally applied to any older version of Visual Studio such as Visual Studio 2013 as well:

1. Since this operation cannot be performed from the Metro Windows Start menu in Windows 8.1, I would suggest that you pin your Visual Studio icon to the Taskbar.
2. Now, right click on the pinned Visual Studio icon to launch the popup context menu.
3. From the popup context menu, select "Visual Studio 2015" (or the name of any earlier instance of Visual Studio)
4. Right-click once again on the name of "Visual Studio 2015" to get yet another popup context menu
5. Now, select "Properties" from that subsequent popup context menu
6. From the new dialog that displays, make sure the "Shortcut" tab is selected and click on the "Advanced..." button
7. On that screen, you will see an option to select a checkbox for "Run as administrator"
8. Select that checkbox and click OK
9. Click OK one more time to close out of the Shortcut dialog
10. Now when you launch Visual Studio, it will launch under Administrative privileges by default!

Web Platform Installer and IIS Recommended Configuration

I was recently trying to install "IIS Recommended Configuration" on Windows Server 2016 only to discover that this no longer works!

Instead, I get the following error message:

Therefore, unfortunately, you have to manually configure IIS 10.0 on your Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 systems until Microsoft fixes their Web Platform Installer configurations!

Why I still hate the Windows 10 Start Menu

With the release of Windows 10 and the re-introduction of the Windows 10 Start Menu, I was thinking I might be able to get used to the new Windows 10 Start Menu, but, unfortunately, I was VERY VERY WRONG!

Windows 10 provides a new "Search Web and Windows" Search icon or Search bar (depending on your settings/preferences).

However, even after installing an application such as "Microsoft Web Platform Installer" and attempting to search my machine for this application, these are the results of my findings:

As you can see from the screenshot above, Windows 10 is not finding the application that I have installed on the machine.  Instead, it is attempting to search the Web for this application!

 However, if I simply jump into the "All apps" section, I can quite readily find the installed application as shown below:

In contrast, if I use Classic Shell (http://classicshell.net/) to search Windows 10, the search results are remarkably different:

As you can see from the screenshot above, the results are accurately discovering the installed application on Windows 10 rather than attempting to search the Web for this application.

Therefore, as you can probably guess by now, I am sticking with using Classic Shell for the foreseeable future!!

Where is gacutil.exe?

If you are looking for gacutil.exe, you may have noticed that it no longer ships natively with the .NET Framework and instead ships separately with the Microsoft Windows SDK.

Depending on what OS you are running will determine what version of the Microsoft Windows SDK you will want to install, but for this example, I will use the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 4: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8279

One of the confusing things about this version of the Microsoft Windows SDK is that it ships with 2 versions of gacutil:

• gacutil.exe for .NET Framework v. 3.5
• gacutil.exe for .NET Framework v. 4.0

If you use the default location for gacutil.exe, you will be using the .NET Framework v. 3.5 version:

• C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\gacutil.exe
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\x64\gacutil.exe 

However, the location of gacutil.exe for .NET Framework v. 4.0 is located here:

• C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\gacutil.exe
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\x64\gacutil.exe

Therefore, if you are targeting .NET Assemblies for .NET 3.5 and .NET 2.0, then you will want to use the older version of gacutil.exe, but if you are targeting .NET Assemblies for .NET 4.0 and .NET 4.5, then you will instead want to use the newer version of gacutil.exe to target these assemblies.

If you accidentally use an older version of gacutil.exe against a newer .NET assembly (ex. gacutil.exe for .NET 3.5 against a .NET 4.0/4.5 assembly), you will encounter the following error message:

"Failure adding assembly to the cache:  This assembly is built by a runtime newer than the currently loaded runtime and cannot be loaded."

If you are interested in the other Windows SDKs, you can check them out here:

• https://dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-8-1-sdk
• https://dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-10-sdk

The network bridge on device 'VMnet0' is not running

I recently went through a Windows 10 Update and when I subsequently starting my using VM in VMWare Workstation, I noticed that I no longer had network connectivity!

I attempted to connect my Network Adapter in my Guest VM when I suddenly encountered the following error message:

Fortunately, it seems this problem is widespread and is reasonably well document on the Internet in the form of YouTube videos such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWqZg25YUTY

If you want to save yourself the time of watching the YouTube video, this is what I did:

1. Go to your Network Adapter
2. Right click and go to Properties
3. Click on Install...
4. Select Service and click on the Add... button
5. Select VMWare Inc.  and the VMWare Bridge Protocol
6. Click OK
7. The VMWare Bridge Protocol should now be checked in the Network Adapter Properties
8. From the Services Applet (services.msc) restart the VMWare DHCP Service and VMWare NAT Service
9. Now try connecting your Guest VM's Network Adapter
10. You should have network connectivity in your Guest VM now!

 

You may also be able to use "Restore Defaults" from the Virtual Network Editor, but this will wipe out any network settings that you may have configured in the Virtual Network Editor:

1. Click on the Edit menu from VMWare Workstation
2. Click on Virtual Network Editor
3. Click on Change Settings... 
4. Click on Restore Defaults
5. This will reinstall the virtual network settings on your network adapter as well

Windows 10 Exciting Licensing Changes!!

Windows 10 has decided to change their licensing scheme to allow Windows 10 to be licensed using valid Windows 7 or Windows 8 License Keys!!

Wow!  How cool is that??

This now allows existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 users to be able to install a clean/fresh copy of Windows 10 simply using their existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 License keys rather than attempting to install Windows 10 as an upgrade of existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 installations.

This removes a lot of the hassles with trying to rule out incompatible software from an existing Windows 7 or Windows 8 installation and allows simply performing a clean install and applying/installing the compatible software from the very beginning.

Way to go Microsoft!!

You can read more about this change here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/11/16/microsoft-windows-10-free-upgrade-rule-changes/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix

Windows Photo Viewer on Windows 10

I recently performed a fresh installation of Windows 10 and was frustrated to discover that I no longer had the right click and "Preview" option when I clicked on Photos!

Well, as it turns out, Windows 10, by default removes the Windows Photo Viewer functionality for viewing pictures which removes access to that handy "Preview" feature.

Fortunately, though, I found a handy article which provides the necessary registry entries to bring back Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 10: http://www.howtogeek.com/225844/how-to-make-windows-photo-viewer-your-default-image-viewer-on-windows-10/

Once I merged/added these registry entries back to my Windows 10 system, I once again had my "Preview" option available when I right-clicked on my photos/pictures in Windows Explorer!

Mcafee VirusScan Enterprise 8.8i Patch 6 now available for download!

If you have been eagerly anticipating the release of Patch 6 for Mcafee VirusScan Enterprise v. 8.8i in order to support Windows 10, you can now download it from the Mcafee Downloads site here: https://secure.mcafee.com/apps/downloads/my-products/login.aspx

Just enter your Grant Number and you will then be able to download Patch 6 from the Packages tab:

You have the option of downloading just Patch 6 or the fully patched version including Patch 6 in order to perform your clean installations of Windows 10!

Unable to install Windows 10 on an SSD

I recently replaced my old SATA hard drive which just failed with a brand new SSD and when I attempted to install Windows 10 on my new SSD Hard Drive, I encountered the following error message:

"We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one.  For more information, see the Setup log files."

I found this Microsoft article which mentions the same exact issue: http://blogs.technet.com/b/asiasupp/archive/2012/03/06/error-quot-we-couldn-t-create-a-new-partition-or-locate-an-existing-one-for-more-information-see-the-setup-log-files-quot-when-you-try-to-install-windows-8-cp.aspx 

However, when I followed the outlined instructions, it made no difference whatsoever!

Well, as it turns out I was installing Windows 10 from USB media and the installation did not seem to recognize that!

As soon as I switched to DVD media, the installation proceeded smoothly!!

Changing screen resolution in Windows 10

I just recently upgraded to Windows 10 and when I attempted to adjust my screen resolution, I discovered that I could not find this setting in my normal Display Settings properties!!

Well, after searching for the setting, I found this hidden under Display Settings-->Advanced Display Settings:

Change your Windows 10 Product Key

If you install an evaluation version of Windows 10 and want to activate it or if you want to upgrade your Windows 10 Home Edition to Windows 10 Pro, you probably want to know how to change your product key to apply your new license.

Fortunately, that is very easy to do!

1. Go into Settings
2. Click on Update & Security
3. Click on the Activation menu item
4. Click on Change product key to change your Windows 10 Product Key

Slipstreaming updates into Windows 8 and Windows 10

If you have used tools such as nLite, vLite or RT7Lite to slipstream updates in the past, you may be looking for newer releases of these products to support Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

Fortunately, there are several such tools available to accomplish this now!

1. DISM: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh824838.aspx
2. WinReducer: http://www.winreducer.net/
3. Win Toolkit: http://www.wincert.net/forum/files/file/5-win-toolkit/
4. NTLite: https://www.ntlite.com/

 As you can probably guess, using Microsoft's DISM tool is by far the most tedious and time consuming, thereby making alternatives such as WinReducer and NTLite more appealing.

WinReducer is commonly used and reviewed throughout the web, and, so far, is the only tool which now supports Windows 10!

NTLite, surprisingly enough, is created by the original creator of nLite and vLite, so the User Interface should be very familiar to those who have used these tools in the past.  NTLite offers both a free version as well as a commercial paid version.

Download the Windows 10 ADK

If you are looking for the latest version of the Windows ADK that supports Windows 10, you can download it from here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=526740

For more information about Windows Kits and Tools, you can read about them here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/dn913721.aspx