Month: May 2015

svchost.exe troubleshooting

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you have a service falling over with no obvious cause, it might be some other service running under the same svchost process causing the failure. As it turns out the Microsoft Performance Team have a very handy guide on svchost troubleshooting.

This covers how to isolate the suspected service into it’s own process, even going as far as running it with it’s own svchost process, so it’s easier to see if it really is the service you suspect causing the problem, or something else. In my case I was trying to pin down a crash with the lanmanserver service, and this was very useful.

Group Policy – Unattended Sleep Timeout

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment from Alain Roy, the answer is here – Sleep unattended idle timeout

There is a Group Policy setting called “Specify the unattended sleep timeout” located here;

Computer Configuration – Administrative Templates – System – Power Management – Sleep Settings

The description given for the policy is;

This policy setting allows you to specify the period of inactivity before Windows transitions to sleep automatically when a user is not present at the computer.

If you enable this policy setting, you must provide a value, in seconds, indicating how much idle time should elapse before Windows automatically transitions to sleep when left unattended. If you specify 0 seconds, Windows does not automatically transition to sleep.

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, users control this setting.

If the user has configured a slide show to run on the lock screen when the machine is locked, this can prevent the sleep transition from occurring. The “Prevent enabling lock screen slide show” policy setting can be used to disable the slide show feature.

What I want to know is how on earth the system determines when it’s unattended. What if you’re watching a full screen video, is that unattended? What if you’re just running an Excel calculation, is that unattended?

I can find very little information, none in fact, on the Internet on how this is determined, but if anyone knows, please share.

Adding name servers to multiple DNS zones with PowerShell

I ran into a little problem today where I needed to add multiple DNS servers as name servers to multiple DNS zones all in one go. So this is essentially adding NS resource records to a zone, but doing it for multiple zones all at once. Yes I could have done them manually, but that’s boring and time consuming. So, here’s a quick one-liner that does the trick, obviously substitute in your DNS server and name server FQDNs in the correct places. If it fails for any reason it will continue on, but report the zone it failed on.

Get-DnsServerZone -ComputerName dnsserver.domain.com | where {$_.zonetype -eq "primary" -or $_.zonetype -eq "secondary"} | ForEach-Object {try {Add-DnsServerResourceRecord -ZoneName $_.zonename -ns -ComputerName dnsserver.domain.com -name $_.zonename -NameServer newdnsserver.domain.com -ea:stop} catch {"$_"}}

Hope someone finds that useful.