I have wanted an energy-efficient multi-terabyte home file server for a long time, but until recently such a system was too expensive for my taste, in terms of both energy consumption and purchase price. But now with affordable 3 TB drives and low power Sandy Bridge CPUs the time has come to build the system I have yearned for so long.

The good news first: You can get a Verisign Authenticode code signing certificate for $99. Just check out https://sysdev.microsoft.com/ for details. This price even applies to the renewal when the original certificate expires after a year.

As in previous years I will be speaking at several conferences this year. February WINone May Citrix Synergy

Are you still using Active Setup to distribute per-user files or registry values? If so, stop! There are better ways to manage initial user settings. This article assumes basic knowledge of Active Setup. You might want to refresh your memory by reading my article Active Setup Explained.

In preparation for next week’s MVP summit I wanted to fill my iPad with movies for in-flight entertainment when I noticed that a large part of my iPad’s storage capacity was taken up by stuff from some unexplained “other” category. Here is my account of what I did to get rid of it and reclaim the lost gigabytes.

Last month SetACL reached the magic number of 500,000 downloads. That is a lot, especially for a command-line tool which is focused on a very specific aspect of system administration.

I was given the Aventail VPN client software to install on a customer’s Windows 7 x64 computer. That failed miserably. Here is what I did to find the root cause of the problem.

Doesn’t every IT pro dream of finding a secret switch, a switch that increases clock speed, doubles the amount of RAM or makes the PC boot faster? Some do, and I admit I was fascinated when I heard that changing a simple boot option would significantly speed up startup time. I made some tests which confirmed what I had heard and blogged about my findings. A lot of people picked up that post, I was happy and everything was great - until I found out I was wrong.

[What I wrote here is wrong. Please read this follow-up article.] Here is a very simple way to reduce the time it takes to boot Windows 7 by around 20% (the exact number depends on the hardware).

Access Based Enumeration (ABE) is a well-hidden feature even in Windows Server, where it can be configured per share, but only in the Share and Storage Management MMC and not when right-clicking a folder in Explorer. Thanks to the shared code base ABE is available in Windows 7, too, although hidden even better. Let’s find out how to enable it anyway.

A while ago I wrote about the dangers of using unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Right now I am connected to such a network and trying hard not to give away authentication cookies or passwords - information that would make it trivial even for amateurs to take over one or several of my accounts.

This is what I’ll be wearing at next week’s WINone: Setacl ShirtAnd yes, the letters are made up of actual source code ;-)

Among the many security options that are configurable via Group Policy, there is a setting Interactive logon: Require Domain Controller authentication to unlock workstation. For security reasons, this is often enabled. Let’s have a closer look at the implications. Those are different from what one might think because the name is a little misleading.

ShMgrate.exe is an executable file in Windows XP and Server 2003 and one of those files that are documented nowhere. I will try to shed a little light on this tool in this article.

Sometimes it is good not to know the truth, but as an administrator you better know what is going on! Most IT pros know that Explorer lies a lot (on a German system C:\Users magically becomes C:\Benutzer), but few are aware that Windows’ permission handling dialog ACL Editor also tends to “pretty up” things.

The introduction of a new file system is a big step even for Microsoft. According to this article in the Building Windows 8 blog ReFS will ship with the server version of Windows 8 only, but will be brought to the client at a later time, too. ReFS was built for resiliency and complements Storage Spaces. This post summarizes the main facts from the announcement.

If you roll out Windows 7 in an enterprise environment you may need to decide what to do with IPv6. As you probably know, Windows 7 comes with IPv6 enabled by default. That is certainly nice, but what if your network does not “do” IPv6 yet? Should you disable IPv6 in Windows 7?

In its issue 1/2012 German c’t magazine published an article about security in Wi-Fi networks. The authors describe how very easy it is to gain access to other people’s accounts and passwords in a world where travelers happily connect to any wireless network they can get hold of. This is a short summary of the original article, intended to highlight the dangers.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Setting up a network share on a file server for hosting user profiles is not too difficult if you follow the steps outlined in this article. The recommendations I give here apply to both Windows roaming profiles and Citrix Profile Management (UPM) profiles.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Administrators frequently have the requirement to adapt newly created user profiles to corporate standards. This is typically done by modifying the default profile, the profile Windows uses as a template when creating new user profiles during logon.

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Nobody wants a temporary profile. So why do I get one? Here are the most common reasons for Windows to only issue a profile that is deleted at logoff instead of the regular local or roaming user profile.

This is a very personal recommendation of what to read to become and stay an expert in Citrix XenApp. Learning the Basics Terminal Services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Advanced Technical Design GuideTerminal Services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Advanced Technical Design Guide Brian Madden and Ron Oglesby Available online free of charge

To all my readers not fluent in German: this is one of very few German posts dedicated to topics mostly relevant to Germany. Immer wieder erhalte ich Anfragen zu verschiedenen Aspekten der Unternehmensgründung. Da gerade zum Thema Unternehmensgründung nur wenige fundierte Informationen aus erster Hand zu bekommen sind, teile ich meine Erfahrungen gerne mit. Diesmal geht es um die Wahl der richtigen Unternehmensform, den Gründungsablauf einer GmbH und wie Software am besten verkauft wird. Frühere Artikel zum Thema finden sich hier.

In my ongoing quest for the perfect way to back up my personal data I have tweaked the setup yet again. Most of what I wrote nearly three years ago (How to Build a State of the Art Backup System for Your Personal Data) still stands, so I will focus on off-site cloud backup in this article.