Some Notes on the Machines

The Beard (alias Hunsinger the Mike) reported just now:

I may have just found a heck of a trick. If you run across PC’s who are getting spotty GPO adherence, and possibly unreliable network connection, as well as their network explorer folder in windows only shows a handful of the actual PC’s on the lan. Try this powershell command:

PS U:\> set-service -Name fdPHost -startuptype Automatic
PS U:\> Start-service -name fdPHost

The above fixed a very longstanding unpleasantry we had been working on, where Network Neighborhood would not show up and other items just would not work normally over a VPN. Oddly, it turns out that fdPHost is some sort of omnibus networking control service, set to Manual by default, but which lords it over several different sets of protocols.

It’s probably not to be enabled generally or lightly, there could be potential for major addition of network traffic, and security questions too. But on the other hand, it’s there, it’s normally Manual not disabled, and it fixed!

Mike later found a companion service, FDResPub, which reportedly is responsible for broadcasting the presence of network resources, by a Windows machine serving them to its LAN. Although it too is by default set to Manual, a reference gives its description as “Publishes your computer and resources attached to your computer so they can be discovered over the network. If this service is stopped, network resources will no longer be published and they will not be discovered by other computers on the network.” And it stops sometimes with no known reasons, even on domain controllers. So this one too, at least on real servers, is a help if kept set Automatic.

When ReadyNAS firmware is upgraded, snapshots can become invisible, losing much space. To fix that:

1. Turn on SSH, in System / Settings / Services.
2. Using putty, SSH to root@nas , where “nas” is the IP of the NAS, using the admin password.
3. Do this:

touch /.force_snapshots_upgrade
systemctl restart readynasd

4. The GUI will report upgrade in progress. Wait for it.
5. We have now fixed it so we can do things to the snapshots. Let’s make them visible in the filesystem. Browse to Shares, click on the share name (often Backup), click the gear icon on the right, and check Allow Snapshot Access, Apply and OK.
6. We can now see them at \\NAS\Backup\snapshots. If we create a blank directory on the Windows server’s hard drive, say C:\B, and do the following, we will wipe all of the snapshots on that share and begin recovery of all of the space:
   ROBOCOPY C:\B \\NAS\Backup\snapshots /MIR /R:1 /W:1
   Full recovery of the space actually takes a bit more, there are automatic elements which initiate after the above is done, and also after the next step is done.
7. Then we run a Balance operation which Netgear recommends. Browse to System, then Volumes, and then click the Gear icon inside the NAS object, and choose Balance. This will take a while, and more space will be recovered. A weekly Scrub and Balance are both recommended. Scrub actually takes longer.

References:

https://community.netgear.com/t5/Backing-up-to-your-ReadyNAS/Deleting-snapshots-over-SSH/td-p/1046740

https://kb.netgear.com/30068/ReadyNAS-OS-6-SSH-access-support-and-configuration-guides

Great input:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn879075%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx

FSUTIL is a general-purpose NTFS tweak tool. Here is a set of changes which appears to be helpful in general towards performance:

fsutil 8dot3name set 1
fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
fsutil resource setavailable C:\
fsutil resource setlog shrink 10 C:\

In order:

• Turns off 8dot3name creation. Does not invalidate existing 8dot3names.
• Increases RAM cache devoted to NTFS.
• Turns off “last access” timestamp storage for files. Disindicated for some older backup systems.
• Makes the filesystem more focussed on “availability” and less on “consistency”.

And here are some which increase reliability:

fsutil repair set C: 0x01
fsutil resource setautoreset true C:\
fsutil resource setconsistent C:\

In order again:

• Turns autorepair on for C: drive.
• Cleans transactional metadata on next mount
• Makes the filesystem more focussed on “consistency” and less on “availability”.

Do be aware that “resource setavailable” and “resource setconsistent” are opposites, both do not get set at the same time :-) Also neither of them appear to be valid on system volumes, errors are thrown.

Here is one set which seems to balance reliability and performance boost:

fsutil 8dot3name set 1
fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
fsutil repair set C: 0x01
fsutil resource setautoreset true C:\
fsutil resource setconsistent C:\
fsutil resource setlog shrink 10 C:\

Very interesting, not tested by this writer yet; appears to be able to handle registry to some extent. One can turn off creation of new 8.3 filenames, and one can also strip existing 8.3 filenames from a filesystem and from the registry:

https://ss64.com/nt/fsutil.html

Right here:

https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/download/

Here is one:

http://www.appmaildev.com/en/dkim

This one is great:

https://www.zamzar.com

Here are two very helpful sources. For many general things, the EPEL repository:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL

and for PHP and other server-specifics, current versions and others more recent than the OSes supply by themselves, Remi:

http://rpms.remirepo.net/

This tool decommissions quite the list of Windows 7 through 10 telemetry inclusions by which Microsoft informs itself of our behavior, using quite a lot of our RAM, CPU, and bandwidth in so doing.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

Brought to this forefront by the Beard, Mike Hunsinger.