Step-by-step guide to documenting your network

Step-by-step guide to documenting your network

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/051214-guide-documenting-network-281391.html

Prevent Ticket Loops in Spiceworks

See explanation here:
http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/1588-how-to-stop-and-prevent-ticket-loops-in-spiceworks

Essentially, the settings you need to alter are in Go to "Settings-> Email Settings -> Additional Settings".
and you need to add a rule in one of the "Ignore" fields.

These fields use Regular Expressions, so search for that on the web to understand how Regular Expressions work.

Setting up an Active Directory Network in Windows Azure

This article looks pretty comprehensive, but I've not yet tried it.
http://community.adxstudio.com/blogs/shan/2013-07-02-setting-up-an-active-directory-network-in-windows/

The next step would be to configure Direct Access and then join workstations to the domain using Offline Domain Join.

BOOM!

Remove Server Manager and PowerShell from Taskbar on RDS

Best article on this is at

http://www.emware.nl/articles/remove-server-manager-and-powershell-icons-from-taskbar.html

The only thing I would add is to also include the following files

%AllUsersProfile%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories\Windows PowerShell\Windows PowerShell (x86).lnk

%AllUsersProfile%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Administrative Tools\Windows PowerShell (x86).lnk

%AllUsersProfile%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Windows System\Windows PowerShell.lnk

%AllUsersProfile%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\System Tools\Windows PowerShell.lnk

References:

http://www.emware.nl/articles/remove-server-manager-and-powershell-icons-from-taskbar.html

Redirecting and Managing Modern Start Menu in Windows 2012

The following text was created by the author of the http://msfreaks.wordpress.com/ blog. See that blog for more detail. Specifically http://msfreaks.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/step-by-step-redirecting-and-managing-the-modern-start-menu-in-windows-2012r2-rds/

As a starter:

- redirect the startmenu for all users to a shared location
- enable access based enumeration for that share
- copy shortcuts to applications to that share (best to make a folder for each application)
- create security groups for the applications you wish to restrict to certain groups of users
- replace the security on the folder in the redirected startmenu. remove authenticated users and such, and add the correct application security group with read rights

If you look in the startmenu now, you will not only see the application folders as "groups" in the all programs part of the startmenu, you will also only see applications for which you were granted access rights.

Login with a test user, arrange your tile-menu, and then, while this test user is logged on, export the .ms file holding the tile positions and such. Add this .ms readonly file to the correct location in the default user profile and mark it read-only, and make sure (script, gpo) that this .ms is marked read-write when a new user first logs on.

Some other methods are available here also:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134269



References:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/da1b4dc6-efaf-4427-a1db-250b930e868d/2012-rds-and-publishing-full-desktop-and-lockdown?forum=winserverTS
http://msfreaks.wordpress.com/

Installing Exchange 2010 SP3 on Windows 2012 (NOT R2)

There are plenty of easily found documents on how to do this, so I'm not going to repeat the instructions here. However, I ran into an issue that none of those articles mentioned, the details of which are below.

I had installed all of the various Exchange 2010 SP3 prerequisites on Windows Server 2012 and followed all of the articles exactly, but whenever I ran setup.exe (GUI) or setup.com (CLI) to install Exchange, I got the an error containing the following phrase:

Could not load file or assembly 'System.Management.Automation' or one of its dependencies.

If you encounter the error message, you simply need to use Server Management Console to install the Windows PowerShell 2.0 Engine feature.



References:
Standard install instructions for Exchange 2010 on Windows 2012 (NOT R2)
http://oxfordsbsguy.com/2013/03/24/how-to-install-exchange-2010-sp3-on-windows-server-2012/

Installing the Windows PowerShell 2.0 Engine
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh849675.aspx

The forum discussions that gave me a clue as to the PowerShell version issue
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15473734/could-not-load-file-or-assembly-system-management-automation

Remote Desktop Server Configuration in Windows 2012

Check this out. It's grand.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2012/10/30/windows-8-windows-server-2012-remote-desktop-management-server.aspx