@s.hackleman said in US Lawmaker States that Privacy Doesn't Matter Because No One Has to Use the Internet:
Well if you don't make mistakes on your taxes, what does an audit matter?
If you don't value your time and your accountant works for free, it doesn't matter at all...
@dafyre said in Autoupdates Killed My Windows Server 2008 R2:
Will it work enough to replicate the AD stuff to the new server?
yes, Yesterday I restored one backup to a physical server and restored one back up to a VM. In the end, I had both working, but decided to move ahead with the virtual one. I can now power on the physical one, create a new VM, join the domain, etc and move forward with that. Of course I say this and most of what I have been working on for the last week should have worked...
I installed one automatic update, and now the system is blue screening. I knew there might be an issue since that's what started this whole thing, so I created a checkpoint before installing the update. I tried a couple things to clear the STOP: 0x0000006B blue screen that didn't work so I decided to revert to my checkpoint before the update.
I'm still getting the STOP: 0x0000006B and it keeps booting to the recovery option.
Building a new DC is looking better every minute. I can still log in to the old physical one I restored to DCpromo it out when I'm done.
@dafyre said in Autoupdates Killed My Windows Server 2008 R2:
Did this improve the usability of the machine? Or was it still dog slow?
Yes, adding CPUs was the difference between being able to use it and it being dog slow.
I added more CPUs so that the offending process only took up 25% of the total system CPU. Then as I was going through the event viewer I noticed that many of the things that wouldn't start and were timing out had to do with the network. The NIC was still disconnected, so I enabled that. It wasn't recognized in device manager, so I installed the Hyper V integration tools. That fixed the NIC. I still had about 6 devices listed in device manager under "Other devices." Right clicking each one and telling it to update the driver fixed 4 out of 6.
I used to think that it was only people that had something to hide that should be concerned about stuff like this. When the IRS started targeting conservatives, that changed. It doesn't matter what your affiliation, if the political wind changes, you could be on the receiving end of what ever group is in power.
So I changed the disk layout of the VM I was trying to restore to and it booted like a champ. So now I have the offending server running as a VM. It seems as soon as I log in, CPU goes to 100% and it's all due to one svchost that calls Power, PlugPlay, and DcomLaunch. I can kill the svchost but then the server complains and wants to reboot.
Update for all those that suggested ideas. I took @dafyre 's idea to restore it to a hyper visor. I went on site and I'm not sure why, but it took like 11 hours to copy the backups 1TB+ to an external USB drive. I brought that back to my office and started the restore. That took about 7 hours each time I did that. The first time I just restored the 
drive. After messing around with bcdedit I still couldn't get the thing to boot. Veeam said that the M: drive was a system drive to, so I created another VM and restored the and M: drive. This time I could boot to the Dell system installer setup, but still couldn't boot the OS.
Then I decided to restore to another physical Dell server I had on the bench. It booted no problem. Veeam boots you to Directory Services Restore mode and then you have to use msconfig to tell it to do a normal boot and you're good. I did that and it seemed like it was having the same issue where I logged in and it showed the desktop but wouldn't respond to the keyboard. The mouse moved, but wouldn't let me click. I just left it and came back an hour later. At that point it was fine. Not sure what the deal was.
There were a few variables to take in to consideration. Since the NIC was different, none of the network services came up. I also disabled a few things like CrashPlan because when the NIC does come online, I don't want it to try to backup to the cloud since it's a clone of the real server that is still on production.
At this point I'm going to try to P2V the thing.
I used them years ago on color printers where ripping a job could take a long time on the weak built in print controller. It's probably been 10 years since I have touched one. Even then, I didn't use it for the scan stuff. The extra processing power was just need to rip print jobs, not for scanning.
By that logic, I see no reason why banks and credit cards can't sell your information. Oh, wait, never mind.
@Texkonc said in autoupdates killed my server:
That is why I always like to check backups before rebooting something that is unkown or not been rebooted in a while.
That's the odd thing. I do have backups and I was able to restore to a point 6 hours before the automatic updates went on. It isn't stuck in a boot loop, but I can't get to the desktop. It's possible that I haven't logged in to the desktop since the last auto update went on. I could try rolling back even further, but it would be better to do that on a test server.
@dafyre said in autoupdates killed my server:
Only other thing I can think of would be to restore it to a hypervisor (and leave it disconnected) to see if that has any bearing on it... and then, you could restore older backups until you find one that works.
In hind sight I wish I had brought a copy of the backup with me so I could try to restore to something on my bench. That's a good idea.
@dafyre said in autoupdates killed my server:
What happens if you disconnect a network cable and then log in?
I haven't tried that. I read about some people having that issue with Windows 7 machines, but didn't think it would apply to the server since it always has a connection to itself. I can give it a rip next time I'm on site.
The Windows update log had a ton of these errors:
2017-04-13 14:24:10:022 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installed rule, updateId = {6CFCF2A8-52A0-4DDC-AD90-71A7736E83CE}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:26:10:109 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installable rule, updateId = {6CFCF2A8-52A0-4DDC-AD90-71A7736E83CE}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:30:10:787 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installed rule, updateId = {0C91D9FF-FEE6-421C-ACCD-15582919F140}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:32:10:846 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installable rule, updateId = {0C91D9FF-FEE6-421C-ACCD-15582919F140}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:36:11:259 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installed rule, updateId = {89185EE9-622B-4D77-9DF7-FE3F2E2027EE}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:38:11:326 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installable rule, updateId = {89185EE9-622B-4D77-9DF7-FE3F2E2027EE}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:42:11:656 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installed rule, updateId = {728F10D0-EFA2-494E-B116-FFCACBCF094C}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:44:11:715 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installable rule, updateId = {728F10D0-EFA2-494E-B116-FFCACBCF094C}.200, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:48:13:563 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installed rule, updateId = {67BCDD15-BA51-4465-BED2-6202AD4A9D34}.201, hr = 80080005
2017-04-13 14:50:13:621 428 1614 Agent WARNING: Failed to evaluate Installable rule, updateId = {67BCDD15-BA51-4465-BED2-6202AD4A9D34}.201, hr = 80080005
@dafyre So far I haven't had any problems logging in to safe mode.
@dafyre I tried that. KB890830 and KB4015549 would uninstall. KB4014981 failed to uninstall with this error:
It was at that point that I decided to just restore from last night's OS backup.
Updates that hosed it:
After those updates tried to install, this is the screen it would stay on for 3 hours before rebooting:
I've had auto updates hose stuff before, but this one takes the cake. I took on a client with a Dell T310 server with Server 2008 R2 Standard on it. It's physical, not virtual. 
I'll spare the play by play, but basically 3 updates installed and after that the server was stuck in a loop where it would try to roll back the updates for 3 hours, and then reboot only to repeat the reboot loop. I restored from backup and now if I log in to the desktop, it pretty much locks up the server. If I don't log in to the desktop on the server, all the services run fine.
Any ideas on what to try? I can get in to safe mode, and I've tried a selective boot where 3rd party services were disabled.
Going forward I'd like to virtualize the server. Does anyone know if you can do a P2V migration without logging in to the desktop? My other thought was to restore from backup to a virtual machine. Has anyone tried that before with Veeam Endpoint? It would be simple enough to build a new domain controller, but I'm affraid when I get to the last step of dcpromoing the old server out, I won't be able since I can't log in to it. I could hack it out of AD with ADSIedit, but I'd rather avoid that if I could.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/prisoners_built_computer_connected_to_states_network/
I'm kind of impressed. I get that out of parts they could find a working hard drive, but it probably had a civilian copy of Windows on it and not much else. I wonder how they got the software they needed to access the prison applications.
@Breffni-Potter said in Working Remotely:
@Tim_G said
It's company owned, and I don't care to keep anything personal on it, even if it's a dual boot. Strictly work. It just keeps all cards and what-ifs completely off the table. It's best that way.
You are doing it wrong.
Emails live in a browser
Files live in a browser
Delete what you don't use.
If the company can remote wipe it, you don't want anything personal on it. If you have company stuff on it, you don't want to let the kids touch it...