In-place upgrade of Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2019
With Windows Server 2008 and 2008r2 nearing their end-of-life dates, upgrading older servers to a modern operating system is a pretty common task. If installing a new virtual 2019 server from scratch and migrating its data + services across from the old 2008 server isn’t an option, there’s an in-place upgrade path from Windows Server […]
Rolling out BitLocker in a heterogeneous environment without System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). How to create a new boot partition for a laptop where Boot and Windows are located on separate disks
BitLocker can’t be enabled, because the hard disks are using the MBR partitioning scheme.
The partioning scheme can’t be changed from MBR to GPT because Microsoft’s tool mbr2gpt says the disk layout is invalid.
The disk layout is difficult to fix, because the boot partition and the Windows partition sit on separate disks
Fixing IP and SMTP blacklisting caused by spam emails
One of our clients notified us that they were facing CAPTCHA challenges/images on a more and more frequent basis during regular web surfing. An ever-increasing share of their outgoing emails was also being rejected as spam. A quick look-up at http://cbl.abuseat.org showed that their public IP had been blacklisted for partaking in a bot net […]
Cleaning a WordPress MySQL database after a malware / hacking attack.
Summary: Using RegEx in MySQL to clean up an infected database Requirements: MySQL 8.0+ or Maria DB. phpMyAdmin or MySQL console access. There are many guides out there explaining how to clean up the actual WordPress PHP / HTML files after a site has been hacked. However, I have not found any good instructions on […]
EU’s General Data Protection Regulation
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifies requirements for how personal data is collected, stored, processed, and deleted. All companies that interact with individuals or corporate entities within the EU are affected by GDPR. To help lead you down the right path, we provide tools and guidance to facilitate ease […]
Activating Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 using the command line
Sometimes the Activate now button in Control Panel -> System doesn’t work, or throws a vague error message. In this case, it might be worth a try activating Windows from the command line instead. Start a command prompt as Administrator Add the new license key slmgr.vbs /ipk your-key-here Activate Windows using the previously added key […]