3 easy steps to reduce hdd partition size with diskpart In a galaxy (Windows) "Millenium" away, for hard disk drive (hdd) partitioning maintenance tasks, I used to rely on third party (alright - "stolen") applications installed on Windows. Cloning tasks where relegated to Gparted, booted off an "old" CD. Since XP-Vista, I got into "diskpart", Microsoft's "barebones" partition editor. diskpart is good for basic NTFS (doh!… Read More
How to make a daily backup copy of a SMB-shared file. Back in the day (when Shadow Copies, GitHub, SharePoint and Google Docs were unbeknown to me!), I relied on Linux file servers with Samba for basic Windows LAN company data shares. Some Company files were more important than others, so having some working copies of those files it was of utter importance (you already know… Read More
[SOLVED]'Stopping-Critical' stuck Hyper-V VM tl;dr: Open PowerShell As Admin. Find VM's GUID. Get-WmiObject -Namespace root\virtualization\v2 -class msvm_computersystem | select elementname, processid, name| ft -auto Kill related vmwp.exe <GUID>. taskkill /PID 1234 /F (Only during specific scenarios/if above won't work): net stop vmms & Restart Hyper-V Server. What happened?! Someday I was in the process of shutting down an Hyper-V Virtual… Read More
build a fileserver with CentOS and Samba. These days, a proper Windows file server is considered "commodity". NAS boxes are considered commodities too. Should you wish not to stick to commodities and live "off-the-grid", your LAN documents sharing needs may simply be served by a simple CentOS box (configured with Samba). "What's the catch"?! No centralised Users management (such as when on Active… Read More
[SOLVED]GPP “Apply once and do not reapply” not working. or How-to forcefully RE-APPLY GPPs (and "do not reapply"). Someday I was playing with Group Policy Preferences (GPPs) and I noticed that my policy didn’t literally apply more than once (ie. after updating one of the policy preferences with the "new settings", that is)! To reproduce the issue, I followed these steps: Created a… Read More
[Solved] Fedora/CentOS emergency prompt after boot. How I fixed a CentOS emergency prompt after boot issue by remouting the slash partition rw and manually editing fstab.… Read More
Hyper-V V2V: Passthrough Disk to VHD Image. Someday I had a VM installed on a passthrough Hard Disk Drive. Some weekend, instead of going out, I decided I required that bloody drive to experiment "some more" ('though, a compassionate hoarder feeling inside of me didn't want to bork that OS). My solution was to migrate my Virtual Machine into a VHD… Read More
How to migrate your Profile From Local User Account To Domain User Account. If you want to join your system to an Active Directory Domain, BUT you don't wanna lose your data & restart from scratch (ie. your Desktop, files, settings, shortcuts, you-name-it), here's how. Gimme fuel. Before actually doing your real Local User Account to Domain User Account "profile migration", make yourself a favour — do a… Read More
[SOLVED] Warning - The IO operation at logical block address for Disk was retried. Someday my Event Viewer started throwing me warnings as follows: The IO operation at logical block address 3b9e1628 for Disk 1 was retried. The above error seems due to a timeout while reading (or writing) data to "Disk 1". Since then, my Event Viewer –> Windows Logs –> System, got flooded! Broken disk?! Nope...… Read More
11 exim cpanel golden checks for quick mail troubleshooting. The following is just some random advice derived from my experience on dealing with email-related issues. More specifically, here I'll be referring to exim (a very popular mail daemon), Cpanel/WHM & CentOS. Check if the user & password combination is correct. Check if the SMTP Authentication is enabled. Check if the User's mailbox is full.… Read More