I would like to change an Azure server's local time to a month ago. This is for testing purposes on a custom application. Happy if it changes back after reboot.
There are a number of similar posts with answers, but most either refer to changing the timezone, or are old(ish) posts whose answers are not valid anymore. Not sure if Microsoft has made some changes.
What I have tried to to stop the Hyper-V Time Synchronization service as well as the Windows Time service, but to no avail. I also wrote a small c# program to try and do this, but no success.
Anything else that might work?
Thank you DeepDave-MT . Posting your recommendation into answer section as per Cameron Castillo confirmation. This would help other community members.
Steps to change time settings in Local Server section of the Server Manager:
Open the time and date settings in the Local Server section of the Server Manager.
from the opened time manager window, make the required changes.
Related
An automated Windows update this morning left my Windows Server 2012 R2 Classic Virtual Machine on Azure in a semi-crashed state. The VM is a web server, and all the files and applications in it are still accessible via the browser. In other words, IIS and a number of other services are still running. Unfortunately, however, the VM is not accessible via Remote Desktop and is unresponsive to commands from the Azure management interface on the portal.azure.com website.
This type of error is quite common and can be found reported on many other websites. The error has been happening to Windows users (not just Windows Server) for many years already, and none of the solutions online will work for Azure users, because they involve restarting from a CD, pressing shift-f8 during boot, issuing DOS commands, restoring from backup, or unchecking certain properties in VMWare or other software.
Does anybody have a real solution for this problem on Microsoft Azure?
After struggling with this for weeks, I think I was able to fix this with the help of Microsoft support! I decide to post the solution here in case it can help someone in the future. Here are the three things that you need to do to fix this:
1-Restore the VM from a backup prior to the crash. The VM with the "Undoing Changes" crash is pretty much toast at this point. Now, proceed to steps 2 and 3 to ensure that the next batch of Windows Updates won't crash it again!
2-On your new VM, ensure that the Environment Variables for TEMP and TMP both point to C:\Windows\TEMP. In my case, they were both pointing to a temporary folder in the logged in user's profile.
3-Ensure that C:\Windows\TEMP is always empty. I achieved this by setting up a scheduled task that runs a simple BAT file that deletes all files and folders inside of the C:\Windows\TEMP once a day. I spoke with a Microsoft representative who said that even though you may have plenty of hard drive space in your C:\ drive, the Windows TEMP folder is really not supposed to get much bigger than 500MB. When it gets very large you may have some issues with Windows Updates (mine was just under 500MB when the updates were failing).
I would recommend contacting Azure support as something may have to be done by an engineer to fix the issue and unfortunately classic VMs don't have the redeploy feature.
I've added only InboundPort 3389 RPD, and works well now.
I'm writting a script that sets up a lot of different applications in Windows (mainly svn and open source servers for http, dns, mail, ftp and db). This script is intended to be executed in new/clean Windows workstations for new developers, it automatically sets everything up to create an environment very similar to the one in production. After it's executed, everything runs locally and the developer can start working right away.
This not only helps new developers, but all existing developers whenever there are changes in the whole system, everything is replicated locally.
The one thing I'm still not able to do is making some kind of backup of an IIS server that is running a web app (it's in the Prod server) and restoring it automatically to the new developer's machine so he doesn't have to install/configure IIS locally.
I've read about using appcmd.exe to create and restore backups, but that works only for the same machine (it uses encryption keys and those keys change between computers).
Is there a way, a scriptable way, to take everything IIS related from one server and restore it on another server, without user intervention and having the restored IIS run exactly as the original?
Thanks in advance!
Francisco
Just putting this here so anyone who comes across this will have an understanding as to why this wasn't answered. A website has a massive amount of variables associated with it that prevents any easy methods to copy all of its configuration through one or even just a few cmdlets.
To get started though you would want to become very familiar with the applicationHost.config file and how you access the properties within it using the Get-WebConfigurationProperty. One way to get familiar with how to script against webconfiguration properties is to use the Configuration Editor in IIS. Whenever you make a change in the Configuration Editor, before commiting the changes there is a nifty little link titled Generate Script, which will have a Powershell tab you can use to help you gather the proper Get/Set commands for the configuration elements within the applicationHost.config file.
I've created something almost exactly like what the OP is looking for and it spans 4 modules (over 20,000 lines of code) and has a SQL backend that holds all of the configuration elements.
When a website has everything from underlying DLLs that may need registered, IsapiCGI Restrictions and IsapiFilters, accounts that are tied to the AppPool that may need added to certain local groups on the server, to secure bindings that require a certificate to be loaded on the server. You can see that this isn't a simple undertaking. (and these are just a small portion of the variables that a website may contain)
There is however a large chunk of cmdlets that Microsoft provides you out of the box that you can leverage to aid you in developing something like this inside the WebAdministration module. I know this is four years old but hope anyone who stumbled on this will find the above useful.
My site is hosted on Azure. I need to programmatically turn off Internet Explorer's default enhanced security configuration settings whenever I repave or redeploy a new box on Azure.
How do I do this?
I found this article on another site http://jetlounge.net/blogs/teched/archive/2009/10/25/fix-ie-esc-won-t-turn-off-internet-explorer-enhanced-security.aspx. It included the following command line syntax, but on my local box I couldn't find the IEHARDEN.INF file it referred to. I also don't think this solution is Azure-specific.
rundll32.exe setupapi.dll,InstallHinfSection IESoftenAdmin 128 %windir%\inf\IEHARDEN.INF
I need to turn off these default hardening settings under Azure because I have a 3rd party IE screen capture DLL that needs to execute Javascript on webpages.
I think that this approach, shaped in a Windows Azure StartupTask running in Elevated execution context will help you.
Just remember that the .bat or .cmd file you create needs to be UTF8 encoded. There used to be some issues with the batch files if they are not UTF8.
UPDATE
I decided to update the answer, because it would have been too long for a second comment. I want to first make clear that I do not intend to offend anyone and the next is just mine personal view and thoughts.
Well, I mine vision might be (is) distorted through mine prism. But, I think that these specifics has nothing to do with Windows Azure itself.
These are OS related configuration specifics and the approach would be one and the same (with some variations) regardless of a (hosting/cloud) provider. If you had to deploy your solution to a dedicated (or virtual) server, you would had to create some kind of scheduled task, or startup task to make these configuration changes. Or even interactively login to make these changes.
Since Windows Azure offers the StartUp Task, it is up to us (developers) to decide what to do and how to shape the OS according to our needs.
The OS configuration changes that one can possibly need are only limited by the total ammount of all available Windows Server 2008/R2 configuration options. I personally do not believe that these needs to be reflected in Windows Azure documentation by any means. They have their place in Windows Server documentation. It is arguable which are "commonly used", because what might be common for one, might also be "never needed" for others ...
I have recently upgraded to the new Azure SDK (September 2011 v 1.5).
Ever since I have not been able to start the compute emulator. Consequently I can't debug the services on my local machine.
I have seen a suggestion that the problem lies with the fact that my user account has a space in it, so I renamed my account but that didn't make any difference. It may be that the problem is that my user profile path has a space in it. Changing the account name has no effect no the profile path.
On the msdn forums it was suggested that I remove *:808 binding in IIS Manager for Default Website. See MSDN Forums
Anyone have any other ideas?
Another option:
So, given the "rename your user account/regedit doesn't work for you, you may want to look at this MSDN article, which suggests you can just set an environment variable and run the emulator without mucking with the registry... not sure if setting the environment variable globally would let you run automatically within VS.NET without manually starting up the emulator the first time, but it is certainly easier.
Yes, the space(s) in your profile path are the issue, and this appears to be a regression for a bug that was found in a previous version of the emulator (the only reason I even thought to try logging in with a different account in the first place). I was literally just putting together a quick blog post here describing the same issue. You'll need to do some registry editing to fix all the references to your old profile path if you want to fix it, or just create a new user if you can deal with re-installing software (I love the Web Platform Installer, but I found out during this exercise that it doesn't do a good job installing for "all users").
Okay, so I'm running a small test webserver on my private network. I've got a machine running Windows 2000 Pro, and I'm trying to run an ASP.NET app through IIS.
I wrote it so that the webpage would use the registry to store certain settings (connection strings, potentially volatile locations of other web services, paths in the local filesystem where certain information is stored etc...) Of course, it worked fine when testing with VStudio.NET 2005, because the user running the app has elevated privileges. However, running it on IIS I get a "Access to the registry key 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software' is denied.", which suggests the IIS user doesn't have read access to that part of the registry (I only do reads through the website itself, never writes).
I was like "okay, simple enough, I'll just go give that user rights to that part of the registry through regedit." The problem is, I don't see an option anywhere in regedit to change security settings... at all. Which got me thinking... I don't think I've ever actually had to change security settings for registry hives/keys before, and I don't think I know how to do it.
Half an hour of searching the web later, I haven't found any usable information on this subject. What I'm wondering is... how DO you change security rights to portions of the registry? I'm stumped, and it seems my ability to find the answer on Google is failing me utterly... and since I just signed up here, I figured I'd see if anyone here knew. =)
If your having touble with RegEdit in Windows 2000 you can try the following:
Copy the Windows XP RegEdt32.exe to the Windows 2000 Machine
Using a Windows XP Machine, connect to the Windows 2000 registry remotely: File > Connect Network Registry
You can set permissions at the folder level for which you want to grant user permissions read/write access.
In your case, right click on the "Software" folder and select "Permissions".
You'll probably know the rest from there.
EDIT: If you still run into issues, you may want to modify your web.config file and use impersonation to have your web application run as a certain user account. Then you can put a tighter reign on the controls.
RegEdt32.exe will allow you to set permissions to registry keys.
Simply right click on a Key (Folder) and click Permissions, then you can edit the permissions as you would an file system folder.
I did so, assuming that a Security setting would be available. I didn't see any "Security" option when I right-clicked on the Key. =( I triple-checked just to make sure... and I just tried it on my XP machine, and it does indeed have the "Permissions" section... but the Windows 2000 machine doesn't. (how's that for wierd?)
In my searching, I found:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/.NET/ASP.NET/Q_21563044.html
Which notes that RegEdit for Windows 2000 doesn't have the Security/Permissions settings... but it proposes no solution to the problem. (Whoever asked the question was using Windows XP so he was okay... but in my case, it's 2000)
Is there any way to make it happen specifically in 2000?
EDIT: Ahhhh... if worse come to worse, I suppose I can do the impersonation as mentioned below... though if I can't set security settings for the registry in 2000, I'm left with making that user have Administrative access (I assume?) to actually get those rights, which sadly defeats the purpose. =(
Oh, let me try that! I didn't realize you could remotely connect to another registry.
(EDIT: I was wrong, it did work... it just took several minutes to respond to my request to change permissions remotely)
The remote connection idea did it! You're good! Thanks so much for your help! I never realized you could remote connect with RegEdit... you learn something new every day, they say! =) Thanks again for your assistance! =)
On another note though, about copying the XP version of RegEdit to Windows 2000... is that safe? I figured they would be coded in such a way as to be incompatible... but I could be assuming too much. =)
Just use RegEdt32.exe instead of Regedit.exe.
Go to the desired key or folder, then open the security menu and click on 'permissions'.