[Powershell] How to annoy your users to restart their computers more often

A few days ago someone on /r/sysadmin asked how others are making their users restart the computer more often.

Since I wrote a little Powershell script for exactly this purpose back in march I thought I'd share it here.

Sending Wake-on-LAN packets from a Wi-Fi device or "why you should disable Windows 10 quick boot"

Recently one of my co-workers signed up for doing home office a few days every week. Being the exemplary user he should be (working in IT and all) he tried waking up his office machine using his notebook a few days before he was going to do home office. And against all expectations ... nothing happened.

Java usage tracking or "How to figure out what Java is used for in your environment"

UPDATE 2018-10-17: The release notes of Java 8u191/192 indicate that the location of the usagetracker.properties file has been changed. The guide below has been updated accordingly.

Oracle announced the end of Java 8 and that they will no longer provide free updates for Java 8 for enterprises after January 2019 here and here. And while Mozilla, Google and even Microsoft already removed Java support from their respective flagship browsers Oracle also announced that they will drop the browser plugin completely in upcoming releases.

[Guest Post] Restoring a Windows System Image from a backup on a network location

This post will explain to you how to perform a full system restore from a backup made with Windows Server Backup (WSB) on Windows 2012R2/2016. The only two things you will need are a backup made with Windows Server Backup and an ISO file of the corresponding Windows version that you want to restore.

Packaging non-executable files as VMWare ThinApps

We are running a VMware Horizon/vSphere environment with a number of virtual desktops. And because I do not want to have all software available on all desktop pools nor do I want to maintain a stupid amount of golden images I was looking into how to create virtual applications using VMWare ThinApp and linking these to specific desktop pools.

And since Murphy likes to make my day miserable I obviously started with the worst application of them all.

Office 2016 toast notifications after upgrading to Windows 10 1709

After the upgrade of 70 computers from Windows 10 1607 to Windows 10 1709 discussed in the previous post people started complaining about a lack of toast notifications coming from Outlook 2016.

And indeed. When checking the Settings app under "System -> Notifications & Actions" there were entries for all kinds of applications but no trace of Outlook 2016 anywhere. And checking a Windows 10 1607 machine showed that it had been there before the upgrade. So something broke with the upgrade to 1709, again ...

Upgrading Windows 10 Enterprise 1607 to 1709 - And why useful error messages are important

As mentioned in previous posts we have about 3500 client computers and at this point somewhere around 600 of them are running Windows 10 Enterprise 1607 (the Anniversary Edition). Updates are handled through SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) and so are the Windows 10 feature upgrades (going to be).

We had already run some test with the Creators Update 1703 but only rolled that out to a handful of machines, mostly internally in the IT department. So last Friday it was finally time to test the deployment of the Fall Creators Update 1709 to about 70 clients all at the same time. We wanted to see what kind of impact this would have on the network. The 70 machines were located on two different floors and supplied by two different switches. I will not go into detail about the numbers here but one switch showed a throughput of about 500Mbit/s for around 20 minutes supplying 40 or so machines. (Later I did another upgrade and 1 machine caused a peak network usage of 180Mbit/s for about 2 minutes.) But this is not the point of this post.