Windows Updates failing after upgrading to Windows Server 2025 Core

My Homelab consists of 4 Windows Servers. They were all initially running Windows Server 2019 (2 GUI, 2 Core) which were at some point upgraded to Windows Server 2022 and then again to Windows Server 2025. After the latest in-place upgrades to Server 2025 my two GUI based installs had no problem installing Windows Updates … Read more

Quick add/remove Veeam exceptions for Microsoft Defender

Just upgraded my Homelab’s Veeam Deployment to 12.3 and during the process there was a big warning about having Antivirus exceptions configured properly for Veeam. In my environment I’m also using PostgreSQL as my database back-end for Veeam. Based on the information provided I whipped up a quick script to add/remove exceptions to Microsoft Defender … Read more

Domain Controllers no longer automatically renew certificates after configuring “Certificate Services Client – Auto-Enrollment” via GPO

This requires a fairly specific configuration to occur but I didn’t see this documented anywhere so I figured I’d write about it. If you run your own Enterprise Certificate Authority using the Active Directory Certificate Authority and have used the default ‘Domain Controller’ template you may run into this problem. By default, it does not … Read more

ERROR_SXS_ASSEMBLY_MISSING (0x80073701) on Windows Server 2019

Update 2025-02-13 In the event this script is not finding errors to correct and/or not working for you, you might want to check out this post and see if it’s that issue instead of this one. Update 2024-02-28 From Nate in the comments: If you find the script is not solving the problem for you, … Read more

Script for detecting potentially vulnerable Log4j jars [CVE-2021-44228] on Windows Server

Update 2021-12-18 – This looks like a much more competent script for detecting this vulnerability and there is a python version for Linux: https://github.com/CERTCC/CVE-2021-44228_scanner Updated 2021-12-17 – Script is v1.4 and looks for .war files now too Original post below Inspired by the one-liner here: https://gist.github.com/Neo23x0/e4c8b03ff8cdf1fa63b7d15db6e3860b#find-vulnerable-software-windows I wrote a script to expand on the command, … Read more