Tutorials/Guides

An air-gapped VPS has no route to Microsoft Update, and WSUS cannot synchronize its catalog without one. The workable answer is to carry the update metadata and binaries across the gap on removable media using wsusutil export on a connected upstream server and wsusutil import on the isolated downstream. The mechanics are simple; the disk … Read more

A print server on a virtual machine looks trivial and is not. The VPS has no parallel port, no USB host and no printer, and the Spooler runs in session 0 where it cannot show a dialog. It can hold queues, apply defaults, convert to PDF and give Group Policy one place to point 80 … Read more

Storage Spaces Direct is the answer to a specific problem: you want a block-storage cluster with no SAN, no shared JBOD and no vendor lock-in, on servers that already have local disks. Microsoft’s documentation is clear about what it needs, and most of that list is exactly what a VPS plan does not provide. Running … Read more

Audit policy is the cheapest security control on a Windows Server and also the fastest way to fill a Security log. Turning on “Audit object access” with both Success and Failure sounds harmless until you measure it: a single file server session that opens, reads, and closes 400 documents a day generates roughly 1,200 events … Read more

An IIS site proxied through Application Request Routing that dies at almost exactly 60 seconds is not a bug in your application. It is the ARR proxy timeout, and the “exactly” is the tell: ARR’s default proxyTimeout is 120 seconds at the server level, but several templates and Azure App Service front ends inherit a … Read more

A redirect loop on IIS is almost never the rewrite rule you blame first. It is a disagreement between the rule the request entered through and the hostname, scheme or path the app thinks it should serve. Browsers report ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS after roughly 20 hops, leaving an IIS log full of 301s that each look correct … Read more

An IIS worker process that hangs usually does not crash. The site stops responding, the request queue grows, and Event Viewer shows nothing because no exception was thrown — the thread pool is simply blocked. IIS detects exactly this, but the useful settings are not the defaults, and configuring pingingEnabled and rapidFailProtection correctly turns an … Read more

Run w32tm /query /status on a newly provisioned Windows Server VM and the first three lines report the source, the stratum and the poll interval. On a standalone instance the source is usually VM IC Time Synchronization Provider — a Hyper-V synthetic clock with no independent verification. For an IIS-only host that is tolerable; for … Read more

Run Get-Tpm on most rented Windows Server instances and you get TpmPresent : False. No firmware TPM, no vTPM, no PCR banks. BitLocker still works on that machine — but the default wizard path will fail with “This device can’t use a Trusted Platform Module”, and the recovery-key model changes from automatic unsealing to something … Read more

Sysmon extends the Windows event log with process creation, network connection, file creation, and registry events that carry hashes, parent process lineage, and full command lines — the telemetry that native auditing omits. Deploying it on a Windows Server is straightforward; tuning it so it produces an analysable volume on a small VPS is the … Read more