Sysadmin

Apr

2022

Weekly Review 22-04-22

Welcome to another edge of your seat, rollercoaster ride of a week. I am getting a little better at remembering to post these!

It has been a moderately interesting week, made significantly better by only lasting for 4 days thanks to Easter weekend.

It was another assessment week at the college, tbh when isn’t an assessment week of some sort, which entailed printing approximately 1 billion test papers. So inevitably, there were several printer breakdowns. Luckily none were terminal and all were resolved within a matter of minutes. Although, it was rather exciting when all of the MFDs simultaneously developed errors. Luckily all of them were caused by users forcing things were they shouldn’t go. So, with a little TLC they were all back up and running in a matter of a half an hour or so.

Other than that I have been mostly running through the general day to day of a system admin. Checking up on the various key pieces of infrastructure and making sure that they function well. We had a few issues, mainly with the backup server running out of space to create checkpoints so backups were once again stalled. I discovered approximately 500gb of archived Vritual Hard Disks and checkpoints to be the culprit so that was fairly simple to resolve. Leaving us in a position were, for the first time since I started, we have a full back that has completed without errors or warnings. Quite the milestone I think.

The only other point of note was a visit from two detectives for the Metropolitan Police. It turns out a house across the street from the college had been used for running some drug dealing enterprise and they were after a couple of weeks worth of CCTV to ascertain who had been coming and going in the weeks leading uptown the raid. The positive of this was that I finally took the time to figure out how to download video files from the CCTV to external storage. The downside is that due file restrictions on the CCTV it can only deal with 4000 files at a time, which is about 2-3 days worth of footage. The end result was it took the better part of 7 hours to fully extract all the footage the officers wanted.

I also built a failover Domain Controller for the network. I am not 100% sure that I did it right, I shall have to figure out a way to test it before we actually have to use it in anger.

I am beginning to think that I am getting the hang of this job, or atleast the day to day parts of it. I still have a colossal amount to learn but I don’t feel like I am living in a a dumpster fire anymore. Which is nice.

Thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog.

Pete

Mar

2022

OneDrive Not Starting in Windows 10

This was certainly a curious one. A small number of users were reporting that they were unable to the OneDrive app locally on their machines. One rather thoughtfully decided to complain straight to a member of management rather than bring the issue to me. I did the usual investigating and discovered nothing particularly useful. Initially, I believed it was potentially being caused by conflicting versions of the OneDrive for Business app being installed. But no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling would resolve the issue. So I turned to that great knower of all. Google.

Some searching showed that I wasn’t the only person having the issue, in fact, it appears to be a ‘known issue’ in Windows 10. Skating right over the fact that it is acceptable for Microsoft to have known issues in their software and expect them to be resolved by the end-users, I started searching for a resolution.

The issue appears to be caused by an incorrect value in the registry specifically the DisableFileSyncNGSC value located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\OneDrive needs to be set to zero. This article from the University of Windsor sums the fix up rather nicely.

However, I needed a solution that would allow for both someone who is unfamiliar with RegEdit to apply and something that would ultimately be scalable to be rolled out to the whole organisation if the need arose. Time for some PowerShell me thinks. Now it should probably go without saying that this would be the first time editing a registry value using PowerShell, so much consultation for Dr. Google was required. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any notes on the exact links I used, but it seems safe to say they were probably either Stackexchange or Reddit.

Ultimately, I came up with the following script which was manually executed on tests machines and confirmed to resolve the issue and, more importantly, not break anything else in the process. Hopefully, someone else will find this Janky little script of mine to be of some use.

Set-ItemProperty -Path ‘HKLM:\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\OneDrive’ -Name ‘DisableFileSyncNGSC’ -Value 0

Thank for stopping by…