Windows | boltblog

Enable remote management of Windows Server Core and Hyper-V Core

Unknownbolt | 2018-10-08

This is a reference for the commands to enable the firewall rules necessary to remotely manage Windows Server Core and Hyper-V Core. I keep having to look these up… Enable-NetFireWallRule -DisplayName “Windows Management Instrumentation (DCOM-In)” Enable-NetFireWallRule -DisplayGroup “Remote Event Log Management” Enable-NetFireWallRule -DisplayGroup “Remote Service Management” Enable-NetFireWallRule -DisplayGroup “Remote Volume Management” Enable-NetFireWallRule -DisplayGroup “Remote Scheduled […]

Forcing Cygwin to create sane permissions on Windows

Unknownbolt | 2018-09-11

If you use Cygwin to mainly manipulate files in your regular Windows filesystem, under /cygdrive/…, you have probably seen this message more than a few times: “The permissions on <node> are incorrectly ordered, which may cause some entries to be ineffective” You have also likely seen “NULL SID” as the top entry in permission lists. […]

Property ‘BindToHostTpm’ does not exist in class ‘Msvm_SecuritySettingData’

Unknownbolt | 2018-09-03

Microsoft has apparently messed up their integration of the Hyper-V Manager on Windows 10 with Hyper-V Server hosts, resulting in the above error message showing up on the “Security” tab of virtual machines. So now what do you do if you want to disable Secure Boot to load some Linux distribution that doesn’t support it? […]

Using external Certificate Authority certificates in a restricted or closed environment

Unknownbolt | 2018-05-24

In this example, we’ll be using a wildcard certificate from Let’s Encrypt, obtained through their recently released wildcard certificate offering. What we’re doing The use case is that we want, for one reason or another, to use this certificate in an environment that does not have unrestricted internet access, such as a health institution or […]

Outlook removes “extra line breaks” from plain text emails: How to stop it

Unknownbolt | 2018-02-08

“We removed extra line breaks from this message.” Well, how helpful of you. Now the email from my crontab script is all in one line. You can disable this “helpful functionality” permanently in Outlook by doing this: Open Outlook On the File tab, select Options In the Options window, select Mail In the Message format […]

How to deal with error 0xC03F6506 when upgrading stubborn Windows 10 Home Edition machines to Pro using a VLK

Unknownbolt | 2018-02-06

So, the machine auto-activates Windows 10 Home Edition at install time. No prompts, no nothing. You insert the generic upgrade key, and it throws an unhelpful error message back at you: Error code 0x83FA067 means exactly the same thing, as does 0xC004F069. This probably surprises nobody, but trying again, as the above message suggests, will […]

Shrinking a Windows 10 installation for small harddrives

Unknownbolt | 2018-02-04

Cheap Windows 10 capable devices often come with very limited internal storage space. To make use of this, it is of course crucial that Windows itself takes up as little space as possible. To combat the bloat, there’s a little known feature in compact.exe, the built-in disk compression tool, that compresses the operating system itself, […]

Drivers for the Multicom Talisa U230

Unknownbolt | 2018-02-03

I recently reinstalled one of these cheap-ass, but surprisingly well built for the price, “ultraportable” laptops. Here’s the WiFi driver to get you started, and the remaining drivers that were not available from Windows Update. Enjoy.

Avoid having Visual Studio put all its floating windows on top

Unknownbolt | 2018-01-12

Working with multiple screens, I often use several windows in Visual Studio. For a while now, I’ve been annoyed by all the miscellaneous windows forcing themselves on top so I couldn’t open a browser on one screen and switch to the code on another screen without the window on the browser’s screen popping up to […]

Making Windows keep the system clock in UTC

Unknownbolt | 2017-11-16

Some hypervisors for virtual machines do not properly support sending a fake system time to the guest operating system, thus making Windows guests display the wrong time if their timezone is set to anything except UTC. This happens because Windows, by default, keeps the system clock set to the local time. This is stupid. The […]