Anguel's Techie Blog

WINDOWS 10 UPDATE: THIS FIX ALSO APPLIES TO WINDOWS 10 , IT IS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT,  BECAUSE WINDOWS 10 TURNS "FAST STARTUP" (read below) BACK ON AFTER UPDATES (yes, Microsoft does not stop creating nonsense features / bugs). TO DISABLE FAST STARTUP ON WIN 10 THROUGH GROUP POLICY PREFERENCES CREATE THE FOLLOWING KEY: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power\HiberbootEnabled and set its value to 0 ! I had very serious problems getting Wake-On-Lan (WOL) to work on my new Dell Optiplex 9020 MT (MiniTower) on Windows 8.1 Pro. I finally got this to work and would like to share my experience here. Note: At the time of this writing the current Dell BIOS for Optiplex 9020 MT was A05. UPDATE: The same behavior is also observed with DELL BIOS A07. Maybe Dell needs to comply with some power saving requirements and therefore enables Deep Sleep instead of Wake-On-LAN? Whatever the reason is, it is extremely annoying that this is the default and it is not ...

The problem: I have: 1. A single physical server which is a Hyper-V host running Windows Server 2012 R2. 2. A single Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials Guest VM running on top and acting as a domain controller. Now I have researched a lot whether I should join the host to the domain running on top of it or leave it in a separate workgroup. There is no best practice but many sources confirm that this is possible and joining the domain offers many management benefits, e.g. here see Option #4: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/11/24/the-domain-controller-dilemma.aspx Now the problem is that after having joined the host to the domain sometimes everything works fine and the host manages to join the domain on startup but sometimes this seems to fail - I think that the join process times out as the DC in the Guest VM does not start up in time. In this case the firewall tells me that the host is connected to a "public network" instead of the ...

The problem: I was trying to get my Server 2012 R2 Essentials (Hyper-V VM) to do nightly backups of my Win 8.1 client PCs. As far as I had understood from the Microsoft presentations the server should be able to wake up the clients automatically from hibernate (I selected this option during setup of the connector). Unfortunately, Microsoft does not care about providing serious docs for their Windows / Server products. What is really annoying is that I don't even find any documentation how the wake up procedure actually works. Does it use Wake On Lan? Are there any magic packets involved? You pay a lot and get something that either does not work or does not tell you how it works. What I had tested so far: I had setup the server to start client backups at lets say 10:00. So at 9:50 I put my client computer in hibernate and wait and wait ... but nothing happens. It is very sad to have to guess and wait multiple hours or days to see if backup actually works on a server s...