Raspberry Pi LCD Screen rotation

So you have your 7" Pi touch screen, but you have a case that mounts it upside down or need the connectors on the other side, what do you do?

Thankfully there is a very simple fix for this.

1, Edit the file /boot/config.txt
2, Insert the text 'lcd_rotate=2' at the top of the file.
3, Save and close then reboot.

This will also rotate the touch screen function to match the LCD panel.

Booting the Raspberry Pi from a USB hard disk or pen drive.

There are a number of Raspberry Pi SD card images which are pretty big, some as much as 128GB such as Hyperpie.

So do you spend £40 on a SD card which might end up being 1MB too small or do you use that old 256GB external USB drive you have in the cupboard. You use the HDD of course.

There are two ways to get the Pi to boot from a USB mass storage device, one is via a one-time setting which afaik cannot be changed back, I won't go near that.

The other option is so simple it's obviously the correct choice for most usages.

You will need an SD card to start the Pi and point it to the USB drive. This can be small, slow and old, it really does not make any difference.

So here's what I did (in Windows).

1, Use Etcher in Dangerous Mode to write your image to the external HDD in the same way you would to an SD card.

2, Mount the drive and copy all files from the Boot partition to the root of the SD card.

3, On the SD card, edit the file 'cmdline.txt'.
  You will see a line with the text 'root=/dev/mmcblk0p2' replace this with 'root=/dev/sda2'

4, Plug in and enjoy.

Multiple VMs one public IP, port forwarding on Azure Resource Manager

If you want a single public IP with say port 80 going to VM1 and port 443 going to VM2 this is what you do.

The trick is to use an availability set. So when you create the servers they must all be added to the same Availability Set, yes I know you aren't doing load balancing, just add them. Don't add a Public IP on the VMs.

Now create a Load Balancer with a Public IP.
  Now create an Inbound NAT rule, selecting the Availability Set will now prompt you for the target VM and NIC.

Each new Inbound NAT Rule can point to a different Network Interface within the Availability Set.

How to set your Public DNS name in Azure Resource Manager

The move to Resource Manager deployment in Azure is not so smooth.
This previously easy option is now very well hidden.

Forget everything Microsoft have poisoned your mind with for a second and remember how the internet actually works, they have finally followed reality.

The DNS names are now attached to the IP address, however, unlike all Microsoft products you do not set it under Properties, you set it under Configurations, confusingly there is also a Properties option.

TL:DR
1, Set a Public IP.
2, Select the IP Object.
3, Select Configuration.
4, Set the timeout and DNS name.

Add disk performance to Task Manager in Windows Server 2012 R2

On Windows 8 and 10 you can see your disks in the Task Manager Performance tab, I had always missed this feature on Server.

But... It seems it is there and just needs enabling, run the command below in CMD and restart Task Manager to see this very useful addition to your toolkit.

To enable disk performance counters.

diskperf -y

To disable disk performance counters.
diskperf -n

Adding a reserved public IP on the classic Azure portal

#Connect to Azure
Add-AzureAccount

#Select Subscription
get-azuresubscription | out-gridview -passthru | select-azuresubscription

#Check for Reserved IP
Get-AzureReservedIP

#Reserve the current IP
New-AzureReservedIP –ReservedIPName MyReservedIP –Location "UK South" -ServiceName MyCloudService

#Check for Reserved IP
Get-AzureReservedIP

More details @ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/virtual-networks-reserved-public-ip

Remove user registration on SharePoint 365

How to remove a user registration from Office 365 SharePoint.

Useful for renaming a user or removing a user in order to reuse an email address.

Go to a site in your collection, Click the settings cog/Site Settings.

Under Users and Permissions, click People and Groups.

Click on any of the groups.

Go to the end of the current URL and change the GroupID to 0 (zero).

This will show you a list of all users and allow you to remove the user from the site collection from the Actions menu.

Server 2012 R2 RDS Farm RemoteApp not working externally

So, I've just had one of those RDS breakthroughs.

The domain is dedicated to RDS to host an application externally in Azure.

Two DC's Two RDHosts, where to put the Connection Broker and Gateway? The DC's obviously, right? Wrong!

It turns out after much troubleshooting that YOU CANNOT USE A DC FOR RD CONNECTION BROKER.

If only that was made clear.

Adobe Reader has stopped working - The exception unknown software exception (0x06d007e) occured in the application at location ox7c812afb

After upgrading Adobe Reader XI on a 2012 R2 RDS session host, Reader crashes with the following error.

"The exception unknown software exception (0x06d007e) occured in the application at location
ox7c812afb"


The solution is to disable Protected Mode in Reader, but as the app crashes you need to do this via the registry, create the following key.

Using Regedit browse to HKLM\Software\Policies\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\10.0\FeatureLockDown

Create a 32bit DWORD, Name: bProtectedMode Data: 0

Exchange 2010 Distribution Group Delegation

Run the following in Exchange Power Shell.

Add-ADPermission -Identity "Group Display Name" -User "User Display Name" -AccessRights WriteProperty -Properties "Member"

SBS2011 Essentials

Uh oh, you just added a user via Active Directory Users and Computers rather than SBS 2011 Dashboard. You've probably tried editing the ADSI properties without luck.

The essentials version of SBS allows home editions of Windows to be added so uses some new tricks, so the old way no longer works.

Heres how to add an AD user to SBS 2011 Essentials.

Browse to C:\Program Files\Windows Server\Bin
Double-click WssPowerShell.exe
At the prompt type import-wssuser and press enter, you'll be asked for the username, enter that and your user will become an SBS user.

I removed an RDS deployment then reinstalled and zombie apps are showing on RDWeb

Previously published RemoteApps can be removed from the RDWeb via regedit

HKLM\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\ Terminal Server\ CentralPublishedResources\ PublishedFarms\ <RDSCollectionAlias>\ Applications

Simply delete the registry branch relating to the orphaned RemoteApp.


You can also enable or hide the full server desktop link from RDWeb via the 'ShowInPortal' key found in...
HKLM\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows NT\ CurrentVersion\ Terminal Server\ CentralPublishedResources\ PublishedFarms\ <RDSCollectionAlias>\ RemoteDesktops\ <RDSCollectionAlias>