The More You Know: Unlocking Windows God Mode

Today I wanted to talk about this is a little known feature that has existed on in Windows based workstations since at least Windows 7 when I first heard about it. Since then this "folder" for lack of a better work has been following me around to every PC I have had since then.

At first glance it looks like your Windows Control Panel on Steroids

As you can see from the screen shot, There are about 219 (on my machine, your mileage may vary) settings that you can edit.

To gain access to this you first need to start off by creating a new folder. When the folder is created and you are asked to give it a name you will need to insert this String into the field.

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Press Enter and the icon will change from this

To this

I hope you found this helpful and informative, and I look forward to you coming back soon.

Free VMware Training is available

Last night while searching the twitter-verse I saw this twitter post from VMware:

Got some free time? Advance your career with some free #VMware self-paced eLearning (40+ courses): https://t.co/J89cSiwIFR pic.twitter.com/n0pHvYV7yI

— VMware (@VMware) January 27, 2019

You can obtain this free training here or by following the link in the tweet above.


I hope you find post helpful, please check back for more content in the coming days.

PowerShell - Windows Update report to .CSV

A while back I was asked by my boss to come up with a way to get a report of all the Windows Updates installed on a remote server that is at a client's site and that we do not have access to.

I thought to myself that he must be crazy to think that we could even find a utility that would enable us to do that.

Well..... Apparently with the right Power Shell Commands you can do it. Here is the Syntax for the Script that you will need to save as a .ps1

$Session = New-Object -ComObject "Microsoft.Update.Session"
$Searcher = $Session.CreateUpdateSearcher()
$historyCount = $Searcher.GetTotalHistoryCount()
$Searcher.QueryHistory(0, $historyCount) | Select-Object Date,
   @{name="Operation"; expression={switch($_.operation){
       1 {"Installation"}; 2 {"Uninstallation"}; 3 {"Other"}}}},
   @{name="Status"; expression={switch($_.resultcode){
       1 {"In Progress"}; 2 {"Succeeded"}; 3 {"Succeeded With Errors"};
       4 {"Failed"}; 5 {"Aborted"}
}}}, Title | Export-Csv -NoType "$Env:userprofile\Desktop\Windows Updates.csv"

The result looks something like this:

I hope you find this post helpful and are able to use this going forward.

After a Second read through.....

If you have read my previous post about this book found here you will know how much I liked this book. HOWEVER due to issues with needed to upgrade my VCP 6.0 to VCP 6.5 I needed to take a step back from my pursuit of the VCAP-DCD 6.5. Now that that is done with that,  I am now preparing again to sit for the exam. My first order of business was to reread this book again as I felt that it would be a better launching off point.

Like I said in my last review I really did like the book and how it was written. But on a second read through I found more mistakes than I did on my first go around. I have to say I am very disappointed in PACKT Publishing for allowing so many errors to make it to print. I am finding this more and more now with books that I read. It is as if they are more concerned with pushing the book out the door than actually putting out a quality product. Aside from spelling mistakes, there were a few instances with the book where a Diagram is supposed to be a certain color (which the author points out) but the picture is in Black and White, or the beginning of the chapter diagrams that are supposed to have a bold box around the section you are working on which is gray scale.

I used to see this a lot with Microsoft Press books back in the day. Which in my opinion was nothing more and a Sales Advertisement for other Microsoft Products.

As stated in my previous post, I do like that the publisher has a email link were you can send your issues to. I will definitely be using that to lodge my complaints and I will post an update if I get any feedback.

I still feel that this book is very well written and contains a lot of great information if you want to learn more about VMware Datacenter Design and I would still encourage you to pick it up if you are in the market for that.

How to Change VM from BIOS to UEFI

I just had a question on the VMWare Community about how to change a VM from BIOS to UEFI.

I found that if you go into Edit Settings > Click on the VM Options Tab and you should see this

I hope this is helpful for anyone who needs this information in the future. 

Office 365 user names with ADSync have the OnMicrosoft.com Domain

So I have been working on a Exchange 2016/Office 365 Hybrid solution. Part of the setup is to install and configure ADSync which depending on the day of the week it could either be a Office 365 or Azure Utility. I have honestly installed this tool several times, and it is never in the same place every time I need to download it.

Once ADSync is installed, It will sync your Local AD Users to Office 365/Azure AD. Depending on how you configure the Sync, it could synchronize the whole AD Forrest, an OU (or Multiple OUs), or a Group. In my case I selected 1 of our OUs.

Within 30 minutes all of my users in that OU were sync'd with Office 365/Azure AD. However all of my users had a @company.OnMicrosoft.com user name. Normally this would not be a problem, however I am sure this would be confusing to some users. I also noticed that the usernames were also not consistent either.  Some of them looked like this:

shinnk@companyname.OnMicrosoft.com

or

Ken.Shinn@Companyname.OnMicrosoft.com

After scouring the internet I found nothing on how to fix this for my users. I was just about to open a ticket with Office 365 Support when I found a Technet Article that talked about how the usernames are generated when using ADSync.

To Paraphrase the article, the username in Office 365 is set by the user's Alias set in Exchange. Which led me to believe that we really have some inconsistent naming going on at my office but that is for another day.

The Article also covered how to change the user names. This let me to believe that I could use this same method for changing the domain name as well, and it worked!

Here is what you will need to do

Connect to Office 365:

Connect-MsolService

Then use this command:


Set-MsolUserPrincipalName -UserPrincipalName Alias@companyname.onmicrosoft.com -NewUserPrincipalName FirstName.LastName@domain.com

If you don't get an error message then you should be able to click the refresh button in Office 365 for the user account and you will see the new name.

Really Strange Wireless Issue

So I had a very strange wireless issue tonight. I have a Razer Blade 2018 Laptop and I use Google WiFi Access Points in the main floor of my house.

When connecting to my normal WiFi network I would get a notification saying I was not connected to the internet. I checked my IP address and a few times I would get nothing, another I would get an APIPA address, and other times I would get just the default Gateway.

I narrowed down the issue to being only with my laptop as all other devices worked fine. I rebooted the routers about 3 times after disabling and enabling IPv6.

I eventually looked at my clients that were connected and found my laptop on the list, even though it was saying it didn't have an IP and could not get to the internet. It listed my laptop as having a wired connection, which makes no sense at all as this laptop does not have an Ethernet port.

I then set a Static IP and found that I could not get to the internet. I started digging through my WiFi Settings and found an option to present a different MAC address every time I connect to a WiFi access point. I then disconnected and reconnected and it Worked!!!

I do not understand why it worked or what the heck is going with my router that it is not accepting connections normally.

I will continue to work on this in the morning and will update when I have more information.

I think I am going to have to open a support case with Google... Ugh

UPDATE: I checked my laptop when I woke up, things were still working. I did a Windows Update and rebooted. Thing continued to work, Then I updated my Razer Software and rebooted, and things stopped working on my Primary WiFi. I can still use my Guest Wifi like a champ. 

I then opened a ticket with Google and after troubleshooting I am no longer able to connect to the guest network. 

I am going to try another Rollback to see if that resolves my issue.


UPDATE: So I am still waiting for Google Support to get back to me. But that does not mean that I am going to sit on my thumbs. So I installed the Razer Cortex App from the Synapse Store and it was able to generate a report of what is going on with my laptop. I discovered that my laptop had an invalid version of the Intel Wireless - AC 9260 Driver which was throwing issues in the Event log.

So I went on Intels Download site and performed an update on the driver installed, and after a reboot, things are working. I have shutdown the laptop 3 times so far and it is still working. Fingers Crossed that it stays this way. 

Network Discovery turning off after Clicking Save

So I ran into this issue with a client where Network Discovery turns off after I try to turn it on and click Save.

I then went and checked on the setting and it was sent back to off. It did not make sense what was going on.

I did some google searching and found this on the Microsoft Forum

I could end this post here, but just encase the post gets deleted, here is a list of the services that you need to make sure are Enabled and Running to turn on Network Discovery.

-      DNS Client

-      Function Discovery Resource Publication

-      SSDP Discovery

-      UPnP Device Host

Hope this is helpful for someone. 

Cloud Credibility...

In my quest to gain more knowledge of the VMware Community I stumbled  upon the Cloud Credibility Program.

https://www.cloudcredibility.com/dashboard

It is setup as a game where you acquire points for completing tasks suck as following a group on twitter, or reading a blog post written by a vExpert. While some of the tasks are simple and easy, others can take a while to complete as they require a group or have a certain time restriction on it.

If you are interesting in learning more and getting involved I recommend checking it out.

Samsung and VMware working together to make..... a TV?

So this one passed by my desk this morning and I found rather interesting https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-introduces-remote-access-enabling-user-control-over-peripheral-connected-devices-through-its-smart-tvs

In short they are using VMware Horizon Desktop to allow remote connections to your PC via a Samsung Smart TV. Aside from Samsung talking about their partnership with VMware on this project it definitely makes me wonder what else they have up their sleeve.

Hopefully there will be more information released at CES 2019 so Stay tuned.

Happy New Year 2019!

I would like to wish all of you that read this blog a very and a healthy Happy New Year!