I think @JaredBusch is right from what this page says:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
Note

If you’ve already successful activated Windows 10 on this PC, including if you upgraded by taking advantage of the free upgrade offer you won't need to enter a Windows 10 product key. You can skip the product key page by selecting the Skip button. Your PC will automatically activate later.

If I had to take a guess from previous versions, if one of three main components changes it will go ahead, and anything else will requires a phone activation or something. I have a Windows 7 machine with 32 bit windows on it and decided to test this theory. That was 18 hours ago and it's at 99% now... To be fair, this is on a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo.

I upgraded 7 32bit to 10 and then wiped the machine and installed 64 bit Windows 10 and it prompted for the original Windows 7 key and installed and activated.

Does anyone run an IDS? I'm working with a SonicWall firewall and primarily concerned with the traffic hitting the remote desktop server since it's the only incoming port. I'm also interested in looking for suspicious traffic leaving our network in the even that a computer on the inside got hacked and was calling home/providing remote access.

Is anyone running Snort that can comment on it? I'm not against a commercial product if there is something that works well.

@WrCombs said in Intrusion Detection System experience - Snort or others?:

@Mike-Davis new to IT ; what is "IDS" ?
and what is "Snort"?

Welcome to IT. You can get quick answers about what acronyms are and other stuff by googling it. IDS = Intrusion Detection System. It's a system that looks at what normal network traffic looks like and tries to find out of the ordinary traffic to indicate that you might have unauthorized access going on in your network among other things.

Can someone recommend a package that works on Microsoft Server 2012 R2 servers that bans IPs if they try to RDP using certain account names, or fail multiple times in a certain time frame?

Some of the older tools don't work because the event log doesn't seem to keep track of IPs in server 2012.

Found the WDS service wasn't actually running on the new server. Not sure why the old one responded, but it's serving images from the new one so I can move on now.

It would have been nice if it was just that easy. WDS wasn't running because the second drive wasn't showing up because it was never set online after the machine was P2Ved and a few other things after that...

Can anyone recommend anything for centrally managed end user computer backups? I have a client with Windows 7 computers and they are concerned about down time if a machine has to get reimaged and the user has to reconfigure all the settings from default when they get their machine back.

I've used Server Essentials and it has a piece in the dashboard where it lets you configure and monitor client backups. Does this piece exist for larger networks?

I could use something like Veeam Endpoint, but would it deduplicate all the OS and software files that are the same on every machine? Is that what you get when you add Veeam Backup and Replication repository?

I agree with everything said. It basically comes down to one manager. His machine got infected, so we nuked it by reimaging it. 40 minutes later he had his new computer, but it took another 2 hours for Windows updates to catch up to current since the image was so old. Then he had to tweak all his apps. So then he asked for the computer backup.

I almost think firing off the user state migration tool every so often might solve his problem, but I have to put the numbers together to show it's going to be expensive to store and expensive to manage for something that would get used very rarely.

For small/remote offices I like the look of the little HP Microservers. They come with what looks to be fake raid. On CDWs site the list an option for this controller:

HPE Smart Array P222/512 with FBWC - storage controller (RAID) - SATA 6Gb/s Mfg. Part: 631667-B21

It's about $600 Is there a less expensive controller that supports hardware RAID? Do I really care for a server with really light loads? We're talking about a handful of users that only need a local server because of QuickBooks and the need for fast local storage. They're right on the edge of actually needing a local server.

I never expected the thread to blow up while I was away. I meant two servers are needed for the remote office. A domain controller and a file server. Corporate IT insists that the DC and FS be physical. Corporate says only physical servers are allowed because virtual servers are too risky. Since they obviously aren't following best practices, I was trying to make a business case out of virtualization and wondered if we could save $600 on the license of Windows. I was proposing taking their hardware and only buying one Windows license to come out $600 ahead and have a redundant system instead of having production go down if either one of their servers fails.

I have a remote office with a local DC that I would like to decommission. There is a site to site VPN to HQ. If the VPN goes down, they really wouldn't be doing much of anything because their primary business application depends on a SQL server at HQ.

We have a client with a virtualized app that makes calls out Outlook to send email as the user. In order for that to work the user has to launch Outlook once so it can configure their profile. What will happen if we set up another RDS server and load balance? Will they have to setup Outlook on the other server? Is the next step setting up folder redirection so their configuration follows them? At that point will we have gained much since we'll have created another single point of failure?

I have a Windows Server 2012 R2 RDS where the clients are getting disconnected at random every 5 to 10 minutes for about 1 second and then their session automatically reconnects. From what reading I have done I suspect this has something to do with the Ubiquiti Edge Router since internal clients aren't disconnected.

I can ping the ER from the outside for hours with out a single drop and only once in a while do the ping times go in to the triple digits. The ping lags and the disconnects don't seem to be related.

From what searching I've done it seems like it could be a problem with the MTU being too large, or the firewall trying to kill a potential DoS attack because the stream is UDP.

Where would I check those things on the ER and does anyone have any ideas of anything else I should check?

I was talking with another tech and he hadn't heard of why not to use unmanaged switches out near users. I don't allow unmanaged switches on any of my managed customers, but once in a while I'll get a call from a break fix customer that killed their network when they created a loop.

What is everyone else's experience? Do you allow unmanaged switches? Do you allow switches outside of the data closet?

(before someone says it, what you really want in a switch is STP, but you don't get that in unmanaged switches, so it's not so much that the switch is unmanaged as the problem that unmanaged switches don't have STP options)

This is the kind of set up that has burned me. Cord getting kicked is one thing. Cable looping around and creating an network loop is another. Remotely you ask them if the lights are on, and they sure are!

If you have Azure AD Connect in place, when you log in to o365 it will tell you "Synced with Active Directory" in the Sync column of your User list.

I used one. It felt heavy. OTOH it's MIL-STD spec. I watched a guy pour water on his and plug it back in to the projector and go on with his presentation. It's also "field serviceable". This doesn't mean that you can service it in the field, but HP can. You need a jig that has magnets in the right places to release it. The advantage is that if a SSD goes, it can be replaced without having to ship the whole thing back. If you have security concerns, you can buy a new SSD and shred the old one and not be out the cost of the entire unit like you would be with an iPad.

I have a client with a MSSQL 2012 database on Windows 7 that they want to move to MSSQL 2016 on Windows 10. (It's used by one user.) Should this be as straight forward as exporting up the database using the SQL Server Management Studio and then importing it?

I have a client that has an iPad from an employee. Someone claims that the end user was looking at inappropriate material on the iPad. HR/IT was brought in. The employee says he wasn't and handed the ipad over and said they weren't and to show proof. IT tried to look at the browsing history most of it was missing and the employee says they clear their history on it every time they use it.

Is there a way to find the browsing history or to search the drive for deleted pictures they way you can on a PC?