gshaw

Premium is irritatingly priced per user rather than FTE but Basic will give you the App Proxy at no cost. We use it for RDS access too, did a blog post about it recently funny enough.

@Simcfc73 Azure AD Basic is free on your EES, you just have to request the licenses

As per the NHS story sometimes left with little choice due to legacy products with no budget for replacement. In an ideal world anything pre-2012 R2 would be wiped off the face of the computing landscape but we don't live in an ideal world. Just seems bizarre for MS to go to the effort of releasing the patch (and open the Pandora's box mentioned above) but then have systems miss it by not including by default in automated patch regimes.

OneDrive Files on Demand, coming soon as part of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update I'd look at hosted SSO providers personally.

Luckily we don't use Drive Redirection, deliberately turned off so files don't leave the network (or we is now bad stuff doesn't come in from home machines) Will have to keep an eye on the CPU, not had the login or RDWeb issues yet so fingers crossed it stays that way!

Sophos aren't even in the AV Comparatives rankings now after their detection rates were shocking in the last test (end of 2016). We're stuck with it for now but on detection alone I'd say Kaspersky or ESET. Also see if any throw in anti-ransomware features as part of the product. Sophos don't and the price to add it on is ridiculous.

What order does MDT process your rules in? Perhaps you have an override at Role, Machine, Location level that's being processed?

Only need i7 for video editing, games design etc. i3 or i5 (if you can afford an extra few pounds per machine) is plenty. Just make sure they have SSD and not HDD, that's where the performance gain is at.

Good time to learn Linux and run it on there instead of Windows

What's up with your RDS 2016 farm? Ours has been stable so far but be interested if there's anything to watch out for. Patching Office really irritates me, for Windows I can shrink right down to a base WIM and a couple of Cumulative Updates, fairly nice to deploy. Office then comes along with 100+ updates on top of Office 2013 SP1 and even 2016 has about 30-50 and takes way too long in comparison. Agree patching for Office should follow the Windows model. Win10 1607 seems the most stable of the bunch so will skip 1703 and wait for the Fall Creators Update which has the long awaited OneDrive Files on Demand feature we've craved for so long.

Not that MS will see this but that's a bloody stupid thing to do not releasing them into WSUS by default

Has it come through on WSUS for you? Just did a manual sync and got loads of new Critical \ Security updates for 2008 and above but none for 2003. Looking at the KB number and searching for it the update keeps talking about Server 2008 but is listed as a vulnerability for 2003, confused muchly... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4012583/ms17-011-and-ms17-013-description-of-the-security-update-for-microsoft Now there's an XP \ 2003 patch for it here... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=55460 But not appearing in any automated patching which is going to be a right pain EDIT: saw this in the comments section which looks to be the new XP \ 2003 patch KB4024323: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4024323&ranMID=24542&ranEAID=TnL5HPStwNw&ranSiteID=TnL5HPStwNw-IlRISJSUiu_Af14KSHrHlA&tduid=(0658ac00db57f0b42ded7aa1a850cd74)(256380)(2459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-IlRISJSUiu_Af14KSHrHlA)() Still no sign of it on WSUS though

Is it just me or is the documentation page really badly laid out once you click the "find out more link"? Struggling to pick out which update they're actually referring to once you get to that big table of KB numbers

Was hoping it was already there but pretty swift release from MS. Think Google releasing File Stream has made them up their game.

Shall have a play with this tomorrow, set a Fast Ring VM up the other day just to see if it was available

Just been trying out my shiny new MDT Task Sequence and wondering why the "Install Updates" step is taking so long to complete (1hr+) despite having most Windows 7 OS updates pre-installed on the Gold image. Changed from the MDT native step to using ABC-Install (nifty little command line utility) and noticed two of the offenders are KB4019265 and KB4019288, both of which are listed as "May, 2017 Preview of..." updates. Now this is the weird thing, in WSUS I can see: update is showing as Not approved (expected based on my Approval rules) update is needed by 1236 computers (not expected!) How can that happen? Granted I could go and explicitly delete it out of WSUS but the logic doesn't make any sense. Any ideas?

This is why I've moved to a completely thin image method now with MDT. Deploy from the original WIM file only, avoids the complications that seem to come with sysprep / capture of a "gold" image with Win10

Ours activate Windows 7 fine over KMS, an error pops up during imaging initially as the 10 \ 7 key clashed but picked up fine after that

We've sent loads of these back under warranty - the date issues and BIOS are due to faulty motherboards. Send 'em off under warranty! Also if the RAM has been upgraded by a third party supplier note the battery is always on and connected to the mainboard due to the weird low-cost design so if not disconnected damage can occur (in theory) if components are added \ removed.

@ZeroHour I think we're probably at that point, the forum software is MegaBBS (very retro!)

Nope, much more random name than that

The hosting was taken out way back in 2003 by someone else, this story actually has a few twists and turns in it too... original hosting company no longer exists a few years back the original server went down, new one came back with control panel and phpMyAdmin busted, still had FTP access our site went offline end of last year without warning found domain records for old host were registered to a different company found owner of the new company via domain records, company check etc found contact details of the owner of said new company via another web design agency they'd done work for owner replied we hadn't paid, in fact the invoice contact details were out of date so we agreed on a settlement to get site back online host said server needed to be migrated as it was a 2003 box, fair enough (runs an ancient ASP based forum that I've now replaced with phpBB on new hosting elsewhere) new server comes back with no control panel, no database web control panel access and FTP details no longer work host explained it away with the security excuse above since payment all contact has now ceased despite numerous requests for the backup archives I set WinHTTtrack on it the other week, it ran for 5 days solid at max threads then eventually gave up once the number of links to fetch went over 100,000. Mainly due to the fact it downloads all the images hosted on Photobucket and other external sites that are embedded in posts. I've got 6GB of data which is pretty good but I know it's incomplete. Basically a last resort if all else fails. From what I can tell the company is registered to an address in Ireland, which is interesting in terms of whether ico has governance there. GDPR would definitely cover it but I think our hosting expires before that law comes in and I don't think anyone is willing to pay the renewal again as it's very pricey for what the service we get. No doubt if anyone applied as a new customer they'd get different treatment or the business wouldn't be taken on in the first place. Strikes me as holding onto existing business through force more than anything. If ico governs Ireland then it'll be the next port of call along with name and shame I think.

One of the websites I help to admin is currently stuck on a host who is pretty much holding the site to ransom and I'm wondering what our options are. The original server we had the site on had a control panel and FTP access that we could retrieve files but that server failed (you get the idea of the quality of the host) and the replacement one we were told "we don't provide a control panel as they're insecure" yeah right We've emailed requests numerous times for FTP access and a database dump but it's gone from "yeah I'll do it soon" to just being outright ignored now. Can Data Protection Laws help us in terms of getting hold of the data we own and pay a fee to have hosted or am I stuck with just spidering as much of the site as I can (it's a forum so lots of dynamic content which makes it more difficult) and accepting the database is a goner once the hosting agreement expires?

https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=2017-05%20update%20windows%207 Seems MS have changed the labelling so instead of the month name it now just shows a number. You want these... 2017-05 Security Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB4019264) 2017-05 Security Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 7 for x86-based Systems (KB4019264)

This is interesting and MS don't help with their wording. Some places I read that the monthly patches are fully cumulative i.e. the May patch contains everything from the last major baseline (the "Convenience" update) and in other places I read you need each monthly patch one after the other. @Arthur what's your take on it? The update sizes seem to suggest the May update does cover everything back and on the reference image I'm building at present I've done this... Windows 7 x64 SP1 Servicing Stack Update Convenience Update May 2017 Monthly Security Quality Rollup When I run a check for updates afterwards I don't get offered anything pre-May but I still wouldn't bet money on it