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Tag Archives: Windows 10

No Logon Servers Available – Adding a Backup Wireless Network

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Every administrator is familiar with the dreaded No Logon Servers Available error message. While the symptoms are the same as a broken trust relationship, the solution is completely different. Simply stated, find out where the network broke to fix the No Logon Servers Available error. Wireless devices make this problem a bit more difficult to fix. Wireless devices without physical NICs can make fixing the problem even harder. Adding a backup wireless network can help you fix these issues faster (or even automatically)!

No Logon Servers Available - Adding a Backup Wireless Network

Creating a backup wireless network involves two main steps.  First, you have to configure your wireless infrastructure to broadcast and allow access to this secondary connection. These steps are very specific to the network devices that you have. The guidance in this section will be high-level. The second phase of configuration is making your clients aware that a backup connection is available. This is done in Group Policy and these steps will be specific to Windows Vista+ machines.
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Pin Programs to the Taskbar in Windows 10 with Group Policy

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Making life easier for my users is an oddly satisfying part of my day. When I found out that my method of pinning programs to the taskbar was broken in the newer releases of Windows 10, I was predictably unhappy. See, the Microsoft UI team made the decision that certain actions should be limited to actual user choices. These actions include invoking the pin to taskbar verb in the previously mentioned script. The idea behind this is to prevent spamming of the taskbar (looking at you, Chrome). Unfortunately, their solution lacks finesse.

Thankfully – we don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel to pin programs to the taskbar in Windows 10. We can simply substitute our pinning script with a small pinning executable that is able to bypass the verb restriction.  Because this solution works on Windows 8.1 as well, we don’t have to worry about maintaining separate settings for multiple operating systems.

Pinning Office with Pin to 10

How to Pin Programs to the Taskbar in Windows 10?

First, download this small .zip file. It contains a small executable (75KB), a sample script for pinning Office, and a readme (because everybody loves a readme). The utility was created to solve this Microsoft Connect bug. Credit to Stuart for publishing it first.

Note: Stuart has an updated PowerShell script that also works on the Start Screen. That tool is here.

Edit the pinitem.cmd file in the zip. Customize the script to your environment. By default, it will pin most of Office 2013 to the taskbar. Note the quotation marks around the file path and around the file name. Use quotation marks even if the path/name contain no spaces. Items are pinned in the order that they appear in the script. In our sample script, Outlook is pinned first and PowerPoint is pinned last. Don’t worry about editing the pinto10.exe path. We are going to place it and the script with our GPO.

PinTo10.exe /PTFOL:"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office 2013" /PTFILE:"Outlook 2013.lnk"
PinTo10.exe /PTFOL:"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office 2013" /PTFILE:"OneNote 2013.lnk"
PinTo10.exe /PTFOL:"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office 2013" /PTFILE:"Word 2013.lnk"
PinTo10.exe /PTFOL:"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office 2013" /PTFILE:"Excel 2013.lnk"
PinTo10.exe /PTFOL:"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office 2013" /PTFILE:"PowerPoint 2013.lnk"

Pinned programs are configured for users. Create or edit a GPO that will apply to your users and navigate to User Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Scripts. If you do not need the applications pinned on first logon, you can call the script as a logoff script. Everyone else should use a logon script.

Open the logon portion in the GPMC and press show files. Drop the script and exe into SYSVOL\…….\User\Scripts\logon folder. For efficiency, Martin Binder (Group Policy MVP) suggests distributing these files to the client first and pointing the script to the local instance of the file. Either way, add your script the scripts list. Below, you can see pinitem.cmd is ready to run.

Capture

To make this script have a consistent feel across multiple operating systems, you will need to configure one more Group Policy setting. This setting applies to computers and can be set in any general computer GPO.

Edit a GPO and navigate to Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy. Enable the setting Configure Logon Script Delay and specify a delay of 1 minute. Be sure to add a comment so future you can remember why this was set. With a GPUpdate for the computer and a logout/login for the user – you should now be able to pin items on your Windows 10 (and older) operating systems!

A Shoutout to Reliability Monitor

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Ever get calls about a computer acting up and everyone swears nothing has changed? Yeah, me too. Problems like this make me love the reliability monitor tool because I no longer have to trust the user (hint – they lie). When I am troubleshooting a computer and want a quick history of the machine, I launch the View reliability history tool from the start menu or run perfmon /rel .

A Shoutout to Reliability Monitor

At a glance, I can now see items like:

  • application or OS crashes
  • recently installed drivers or applications
  • software updates
  • unsuccessful installs/uninstalls
  • reported problems (and uninstalled solutions)

The default view is a linear chart by day but you can also sort the monitor by weeks. The next time you get a call about a slow machine or a broken application, launch the reliability monitor to get a bird’s-eye view. And if you have a favorite troubleshooting tool, let me know what it is in the comments below.

Concurrent Remote Desktop (CRDP) for Windows 10

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Concurrent Remote Desktop (CRDP) for Windows 10

An update to this post (that covers the latest Windows 10 versions) is now available here.

You are checking the helpdesk and a new problem rolls in. You know the solution but you (the administrator) will need to login. You immediately remote into the machine only to see that the user is showing a presentation or actively using it.

Do you:

A) Call the user and have them log off so that you can start fixing the problem. The problem will get fixed but the user is interrupted for 20 minutes.

B) Wait until later in the day and hope the user isn’t using their computer. The problem will get fixed at the end of the day but the user had to deal with it all day.

C) Use RDP and log into the computer. The user is able to continue the presentation. You are able to fix the problem in the background. Everybody is happy!

The answer is C!

“That’s wrong!”, you say! “Client OSs can’t have concurrent RDP sessions. When you try, you get an ugly message and the current logged in user is logged out!”

CRDP 01

If Server can, the client can! All we have to do is trick it! How? Let’s find out! Continue reading →