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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Microsoft Hyper-V comes with a built-in replication feature, which allows for almost real-time replication of virtual servers between two separate physical locations. The primary server handles all company data while it also sends a copy of all data to the backup server at very frequent intervals. In case the primary server fails due to hardware […]

If you’re stuck with old 2003 VM’s, you can make yourself slightly less antiquated by upgrading them in-place to 2008. Since the 2003 servers are most likely running 32-bit Windows, you won’t be able to take the step up to 2008R2 or 2012 though. Before upgrading, make sure you download 2008 Service Pack 2 and […]

Virtualizing aging Windows 2000/ 2003 / 2008 / 2008R2 servers into Hyper-V virtual machines can be tricky, especially if the old servers are partitioned using GPT disks or Dynamic disks. Using the following steps will get you through the virtualization process in a few hours: – Use Microsoft’s free Disk2vhd tool to convert each partition […]

For larger network installations where 100% up-time is a must, we often join all physical servers into a “Hyper-V cluster”. In a cluster, two or more physical servers share the virtual workload among themselves. If one server goes down or is restarted because of Windows updates, all Virtual Machines will remain online and end-users will […]