Windows Server

How to reset a user password on AD without meeting complexity requirements

Open “Active Directory Users and Computers” tool

right click on your “domain” and then click “Properties”

Then click on “Attribute Editor” tab

Scroll down to “PWDPROPERTIES”, click to select the row and the click on “Edit” button

set the value to 0 and click “Apply”

now you can use non complex password to edit or create a new one.

After doing your needs, remember to reset the “PWDPROPERTIES” back to 1

How To Repair Broken EFI Partition

Steps:

  1. Enter Windows Setup or Windows Recovery to get cmd (Command Prompt)
  2. Make sure that both your Windows Partition and EFI Partition are assigned a drive letter
  3. Use diskpart utility to assign a letter to the EFI Partition (i.e.: T:)
  4. Make sure you know which drive letter each partition is assigned
  5. When you’ve got both partitions ready with a drive letter use this command:
    1. C:\Windows\System32\bcdboot C:\Windows /s T:
  6. That will cause the EFI bootloader files to be copied from you Windows Partition onto your EFI partition which should get it working.

How To Repair Broken EFI Partition

Assign both your Windows partition and your EFI partition a drive letter.  The EFI partition by default is not assigned a drive letter, but you can use diskpart to assign a letter temporarily.  Then make sure you know which drive letter each partition is assigned in the environment you’re using. When you’ve got both partitions assigned a drive letter and you know which partition has which drive letter, modify the example command below as needed.  In the command below, the EFI partition is X: and the Windows partition is C.  Change those as needed for your setup:

C:\Windows\System32\bcdboot C:\Windows /s X:

That will cause the EFI bootloader files from your Windows partition to be copied onto your EFI partition, which should get it working.

If it doesn’t work, try formatting your EFI partition as FAT32 just to erase it and start from scratch, then try running that command again.  Again, that command is what Windows Setup runs when it first installs Windows in order to set up the EFI partition, so it should be able to get you a working EFI partition again.

Hyper-V Virtual Switches

Types of Virtual Switches

External – This type of switch is bound to the physical network cards located in the host. As you would imagine, they provide VMs located on these switches with access to the physical network the Hyper-V host is connected to. The External switch can also share management traffic as well as VM traffic on the same switch and this is one of the options that can be set when creating the external switch.

Internal – This switch is not bound to a physical network card so only allows traffic between VMs and the host itself. However, a new addition to the Internal switch functionality in 2016 is the addition of the NAT forwarding internal switch which does allow external connectivity via NAT from the Hyper-V host.

Private – This type of switch is only used for virtual machines to communicate with each other. This type of switch might be useful for certain specific types of traffic such as cluster network if only using one host as it can’t be utilized between hosts.