Anguel's Techie Blog

I was looking for a simple but effective solution to use external USB disk drives attached to my server for backup with backup applications that do not directly support USB drive rotation / swapping. Unfortunately, Windows does not seem to support assigning the same drive letter to different USB drives, e.g. you cannot assign the letter U: to two different USB drives. This would be nice to be able to rotate the drives but it does not work. So my idea was to use a network share name that automatically mounts different USB drives to the same share name , depending on which USB drives are connected, that creates some sort of priority as we will see. An additional advantage is that drive can be also accessed directly from other computers through the network share. The first step is to assign different drive letters to each USB disk through Windows disk management, e.g. U: and V:. Then create the same directory to be shared on each drive, e.g. "USB_SHARE". Backups will be...

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...

This is intended to be a guide how to install Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 ESSENTIALS as a virtual server, i.e. inside a virtual machine (VM). This VM will run on a physical Hyper-V host which will be again Windows Server 2012 R2 ESSENTIALS itself. This type of installation is allowed by Microsoft but they have not included a tool to simplify the process. In order to achieve our aim, we need to modify the original ISO by removing the Essentials Role and Essentials Setup using Microsoft's own tools. DISCLAIMER: To my best knowledge everything described here complies with the MS license terms. It worked for me but does not mean that it will work for you as is. So make sure that you have understood everything and check if each step applies to your system. There is no liability for damages. Physical Hyper-V Host vs Virtual Server (Guest VM) Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials is a very interesting operating system for small businesses. What many people don't know: Microsoft...

A few days ago I received my new Nexus 5 smartphone. At first look, the display looked ok, not the quality of Samsung or even the higher priced LG Android phones but ok for the price. But then, while sliding my finger over the touchscreen I noticed something uneven. It looked like a small black dot, similar to a dead pixel but I asked myself why I could feel this spot with my finger? First I thought that it was some particle attached to the screen and tried to carefully scratch it off with my finger nail. But it did not go away. It was definitely NOT a dead pixel. Looking more carefully at the screen I also noticed other similar small black dots, the size of a few pixels. So I finally decided to look what these were under a microscope. And it turned out these were black metal or paint spots melted into the screen! I did not expect that. I mean I expect some drawbacks because of the lower price but I don't expect such quality problems. Google and LG cannot advertise the phone wi...

The whole UI concept is nuts. Share is probably the most used function. Now lets see what happens on an Android tablet if you want to share a photo one of your friends has shared. 1. Facebook App: NO "share" button at all. So you must click on a photo to open it in full size first, then select "share" from the Android options menu but this stupid app starts sharing this as your own photo - it even asks where the photo was taken! 2. In the Browser: Firefox for Android: Facebook site as intelligent as it is, opens some crippled mobile version of the site that looks like Netscape 1.0 and again NO "share" link - here there is NO way to share something. Opera for Android: Here for some unknown reason I finally see the normal facebook website including a "share" link. Unfortunately the facebook site uses some stupid scripts that will screw up the Opera browser at some point. Bottom line: There is no user friendly / working way to ...