Windows 10 – You’ll need the internet for this 0xCAA7004 or 0xCAA30194 or 0x80072EFD

I must admit that it was a bit embarrassing to see my Administrator password expired when I tried to log in as Domain Admin to Domain Controller. I got this little message saying This user account’s password has expired. The password must change to logon. Please update the password or contact your system administrator or technical support.

When I created ImagePlayground, I thought about how to show its usefulness to the general community. On how to deliver what PowerShell can do. Then I saw on some forum people asking BGInfo to expand and allow running PowerShell scripts so that the data on the BGInfo Wallpaper can be gathered from PowerShell rather than VBS. I thought this was a great idea to create BGInfo using PowerShell without the necessity of using BGInfo at all.

Working as a freelancer is a great thing if you can handle it. Each day, each week something new happens and a new problem shows up on my doorstep. It also means it’s almost never boring at your job and you get to play with new stuff. But there’s one drawback to this. You’re often thrown at the problem, told to fix it but often that’s about as much information as you get. It wasn’t very different today. I was told to switch Office 365 from ADFS to Password Synchronization. While reasons for this are not really important, the important question here is what is the name of AD Connect server that’s responsible for this configuration?

During synchronization of Active Directory with Office 365 via Azure AD Connect I was greeted with a list of accounts that have permission-issue. Error message by itself gives you a slight hint, but it doesn’t tell you exactly where to look.

Recently I had a weird case where one of our Azure servers was starting losing space pretty quickly making Pulseway go nuts. As you can assume from the title of this post the cause for this is Azure Agent itself. But before I actually knew that I had to do some digging as it’s not that obvious because Windows Explorer isn’t showing anything worth checking.

I’ve been working with Windows Events for a while now. One of the things I did to help me diagnose problems and reporting on Windows Events was to write PSEventViewer to help to parse the logs and write PSWinReporting to help monitor (with use of PSEventViewer) Domain Controllers for events that happen across the domain. It’s handy and I, get those excellent daily reports of what happened while I was gone.

Today I’ve been setting up a new server on Windows 2019. By default, I install Windows with English version even if Client works in their language such as German, Polish or Swedish. While some people install Windows in a language they desire to work with, years of experience taught me that installing English and then adding Language Pack is the best way to go. All errors, windows events, and general troubleshooting is much easier if those are in the native English language. Each version of Windows made it easier to install the language pack and have that up and running in no time. In Windows 2019 it’s even more comfortable… or is it?

It’s been less than 24 hours since I’ve released PSBlackListChecker with support, among other improvements, for Microsoft Teams and Slack and I’m now adding Discord to the mix. Discord was a popular request (well not really, just one person asked, but let’s pretend everyone loves PSBlackListChecker so much that they are too shy to ask for feature requests!).

If you feel this title is very familiar to you it’s because I actually have stolen the title from Kevin Marquette. I’m in awe of his posts that take you thru topic from beginning till the end. No splitting, no hiding anything, everything on a plate, in a single post. That’s why I’ve decided to write a post that will take you on a trip on how to work with Event Logs, something that is an internal part of Windows Administration. If you’ve never worked with Events and you’re in IT you most likely should make an effort to find out what it is and how you can eat it.

A few weeks ago I’ve released my first version of PSWinDocumentation. It was simple, one command module where you start it and get some basic AD stuff into Microsoft Word document. Today… I’m releasing a new version that has a bit bigger feature set. Are you ready for it? Let’s go!

Windows 10 was released by Microsoft on July 29th of 2015. Even though several months has already passed, millions of users…