Windows Server on justinverstijnen.nl

Active Directory FSMO roles

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What are the FSMO roles of Active Directory?

FSMO stands for Flexible Single Master Operations. Active Directory is normally multi-master, meaning changes can be made on any domain controller. However, some operations must be handled by one specific domain controller at a time to avoid conflicts. These special responsibilities are called the FSMO roles.

There are five FSMO roles:

Two forest-wide roles
Three domain-wide roles

Let’s look at them all and explain what their function is:

Managing Hyper-V server without Active Directory

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When you use Hyper-V server, you want to manage this with the management tools. However, by default Hyper-V only allows connections from domain-joined machines by design because of security and trust reasons.

We can bypass this requirement by building these trust ourselves and so managing the server from a machine that isnt even in a domain but Entra ID Joined or in a workgroup.

Installing Hyper-V management tools

When you use Windows 11 Pro/Education/Enterprise, you have the option to install Hyper-V on your machine. This can be done through the features on demand window:

Solved: August 2024 updates breaks GPO Item level targeting - user in group

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you are managing Windows Servers, Group Policies are a great way to distribute settings to your endpoints. However, a recent update of August 2024 in Windows Server 2022 and 2019 breaks user filtering in Group Policy (GPO) Item Level Targeting

The problem itself

When applying printers, registery settings or drive maps to users, we use Group Policy Item level targeting to filter users so only users with a group membership gets the policy applied.

Migrate Group Policies to a new server or domain like a pro

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Once in a while, we as IT administrators need to export and import our Group Policies of Windows Server to another server. Sometimes to copy a great policy you’ve built, or to migrate a customer to a new server.

By default, the only option Microsoft has built in into Group Policy Management (gpmc.msc) is the backup option. This creates some administrative tasks.

The Export and Import scripts

I have created two scripts with Powershell that fully exports and imports all Group Policy Objects (GPOs). This with 2 seperate scripts. These can be found and downloaded from my Github page:

Change Evaluation version to Standard/Datacenter version

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When you install a fresh Windows Server installation from a .iso file, it will be installing the OS as a Evaluation version. When you want to activate the installation with a key you need to rebuild the OS and set the edition to Standard.

Microsoft considers Standard and Standard Evaluation as different editions of Windows, because of this we have to change the edition before you can activate the installation. When you want to use the edition Datacenter, you can change the command to Datacenter which also works.