Long story short: During the transition of antivirus software to Windows Defender Antivirus (WinDefend), I don’t want Windows Defender remediation on threats it might find. Later, when I have more information about potential threats, I can always choose to remediate that threat, e.g. quarantaine or remove it. Unfortunately, there is no PowerShell cmdlet to configure this. Here is how to (temporarily) turn off routine remediation.
…Since I started expanding my Zabbix scripts and templates for monitoring Windows Server instances – AD, IIS and SQL Server – I found WMI was failing more and more. WMI stopped working: WmiPrvse.exe would just crash after hitting some memory limit of 512 MB. If you run into the same issue with Windows Management Instrumentation, here is how you can increase WMI Provider Service’s memory quota. Doing so resolved my issues.
Increase WMI memory to support large volume of queriesRead More »
Learn how to install and configure IIS Manager for Remote Administration of your Windows Server IIS web server, in Windows 10 and Windows 11. Step by step. You can use IIS Manager to administer various components of your website through a graphical user interface (GUI) if it’s hosted in Windows Server IIS.
…
This is part 3 about Zabbix monitoring for your websites and ASP.NET applications in IIS. This time I’ll show you how to get data from Win32_PerfRawData_PerfProc_Process counter, fast, for everey application pool This counter is notorious for its slowness, but you can get data a bit faster. IIS AppPool Insights in Zabbix – because there is always more than one way.
…When you host multiple websites in IIS, and you need to monitor them, Zabbix is one of your options. In Zabbix, you can take advantage of Windows Servers performance counters using perf_counter and perf_counter_en. In this article, I’ll show you some important Windows performance counters to monitor your ASP.NET web application in Zabbix.
…ASP.NET web application monitoring in Zabbix, part 2Read More »
Zabbix can harnas the powers of WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to query the Windows system for data. In Zabbix you use wmi.getall for this. Here is a small introduction to query the number of running w3wp.exe processes per application pool in Zabbix so you can start monitoring Microsoft Windows Server IIS with Zabbix.
…
OpenSSH is an ideal and secure way of performing remote maintenance & administration on your servers. Even on Windows Server! :) Microsoft have released their OpenSSH port for Windows Server and Windows 10 back in 2015. Here is how to install the OpenSSH Server on Windows Server 2022, 2019 and 2016.
…
Quickly and dirty determine if a condition is true or false in PowerShell 5.1 by emulating the ternary operator. For example when determinering if the server you are servicing is a Windows Server Desktop Experience version or not (and thus Server Core):
…No more need for Windows Server IIS? Want to remove IIS completely from Windows Server using PowerShell? Start your PowerShell console as admin, and issue the following command in PowerShell:
…How to remove IIS from Windows Server using PowerShellRead More »
When WSUS downloads are slow. WSUS uses BITS for downloading updates, and it does so in background mode. Unfortunately, this utilizes remaining bandwidth of the server instead of its full capacity. To speed up WSUS downloads, you can configure BITS in WSUS to use foreground priority.
…Force BITS to download WSUS updates in the foreground in Windows ServerRead More »
When you are migrating a file server to a new server, and transfer data to your new SMB share, you may need to recreate junction points, as they can’t be copied using (for example) Robocopy. Therefore it’s a must to know where you have junction points, and that’s where plain old DIR comes to the rescue.
…Quickly view all symbolic links, junctions points and hard links in a folderRead More »
On a daily bases, new vulnerabilities are found in WordPress plugins. And when you host thousands of WordPress sites, you can count on the fact you have some customers using that vulnerable version of that particular plugin. So you need to find those vulnerable versions on your servers fast. On Windows Server, PowerShell is a perfect tool for the job!
…Find vulnerable WordPress plugin versions fast using PowerShellRead More »
This post contains some example WMI filters for you to use in Group Policy Objects (GPOs) to target and manage specific Windows Server versions like 2012R2, 2016 and Windows Server 2019. Using the Windows Management Infrastructure, or WMI, Windows admins can create filters to apply GPOs more granular on specific versions of Windows Server. In this post I provide some basic examples.
…WMI Filters for Group Policy to manage Windows Server versionsRead More »
When you set up a new public facing FTP server in Windows Server IIS (FTPSvc), it is important to properly secure it. Of course there’s authentication and authorization, but in this post I’ll show you how to configure an IP allow list for IIS FTP Server using PowerShell, iisadministration and webadministration modules.
…Thank you Ronald as I needed exactly this today. Here is how to remove phantom application folders from websites in IIS using PowerShell.
…Removing phantom application folders from website configuration in IISRead More »