Some Notes on the Machines

A very nice downloader provided by Microsoft:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows8

This has been happening on long-installed machines for quite a while. But in the last week, four different sets of Windows 7 64-bit install media, over seven different reloads, have had Windows Update get stuck, or freeze, while searching for Windows updates, eating 100% of one CPU core. Several changes in reload pattern were attempted, some of which included WSUSoffline, without success. Profoundly expert help provided the following. Before deliberately attempting Windows Update, we are to install these, in this order:

1. Servicing stack update for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1: September 20, 2016:
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3177467

2. July 2016 update rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1:
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3172605

3. September 2016 update rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1:
   https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3185278

Windows Update may get stuck again, searching for new updates, the first time any of the above is attempted. If this occurs, each time, we do this:

1. In TASKMGR, terminate process wusa.exe
2. Restart service wuauserv
3. Try the install again.

The second time we do each install (after the termination and service restart), the popup for searching for Windows updates comes up for 3-10 seconds, and then we are asked whether we want to install. We then say yes, and it installs. Then we move to the next one of the three!

Here are settings useful to maximize performance of a hardware network interface. Virtual guests benefit by these being applied to their virtual host, only. Not all of these exist on every NIC. There are also many settings which should not be touched, or should be touched only when the toucher knows what they are doing! The below have always helped when this writer has found them available to try. Do be warned, the NIC will go offline for 2-10 seconds after you Apply most of these.

1. Install the most current drivers for NICs and also motherboard chipset. In at least one case, the server vendor had only an outdated and unreliable driver available for download, the one which worked well for years came from Intel’s web site.
2. “DMA Coalescing” on.
3. “Enable PME” off.
4. “Energy Efficient Ethernet” off.
5. “Green Ethernet” off.
6. “Gigabit Lite” off.
7. “Adaptive Inter-Frame Spacing” on.
8. All offloading on.
9. “Interrupt Moderation” on.
10. “Interrupt Moderation Rate” should be “Adaptive”.
11. “Scaling”, should be “on” or “Enabled”.
12. “Receive Side Scaling” on.
13. “Receive Side Scaling Queues” to maximum.
14. There are cache settings on all server-class NICs, separate for send and receive. They are usually called “Receive Buffers” and “Transmit Buffers”, or “Receive Descriptors” and “Transmit Descriptors”. Set them to the maximum. For current Intel server NICs the defaults are usually 256 or 512, and the maximums are 2048; for a few other kinds, one or the other is 5000 or more; for others it is much less. Each descriptor takes 2K of RAM, which in today’s multigigabyte world is well worthwhile. Some older Broadcom gigabit NICs will yellow-flag if they are set to 2048; for these, set receive to 750, transmit to 1500.
15. In the NIC’s “Power Management” tab, turn everything off. This may have to be abridged if Wake-On-LAN is used. Some NICs, notably some Realtek, will automatically turn power management back on at boot; this needs to be fixed through group policy.
16. In SBS 2008, only one NIC (or one NIC team) is permitted to represent the server on the network. If there are two active NICs, you will have to turn one off, or crashes and unpredictable behavior will result sooner or later.

The amazing David Lewis recently discovered something very close to unbelievable. A user profile on a PC — not a user, not a PC — had full administrative rights to a folder on a server on the domain, where the user was explicitly denied such rights. Deletion and replacement of the user profile, eliminated the problem.

Today I found it ridiculously difficult to download IE11 on a Windows 7 box which had not seen updates in a while. If you suffer so, browse here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/18520/download-internet-explorer-11-offline-installer

Offline installers in many languages.

Rather a neat tool:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

Can eliminate a lot of issues in Explorer.

Some very interesting info:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/1b926c85-b866-464b-9590-70506ba9d8ce/vss-issue-event-id-22-12289-12293-error-0×8004230f-failed-to-retrieve-volumes-that-are-eligible?forum=windowsbackup

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb891959#mindiffareafilesize

Here are some steps and info:

http://www.storagecraft.com/support/kb/article/32

Here is a Fix-It from Microsoft for Server 2003, which runs quite a few steps automatically, and does not (this is new) necessarily require a reboot:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940184

And lastly, here is a patch from Microsoft which can help a lot in Server 2003, even on fully-updated machines:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;891957

This can do a lot of good:

https://www.rizonesoft.com/download/complete-internet-repair/

If you find that login occurs, but no desktop just blackscreen, add the local users “Interactive” and “Authenticated Users” to the local group “Users”, i.e.:

net localgroup Users Interactive /add
net localgroup Users "Authenticated Users" /add

If your software is all new, let’s say 2013 and after, it probably makes sense to disable 8.3 filename generation, for a nice kick of speed.

To do it once for all drives, just do this:

fsutil behavior set Disable8dot3 1

If you want to do it for one select drive, say E:, first do a registry edit in

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

you’ll want to change NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation to 2. Then you will need to reboot, and in an administrative command prompt:

fsutil behavior set E: 1

and reboot again, and it’s done.