Issue Pervasive SQL services (Pervasive PSQL Relational Engine and Pervasive PSQL Transactional Engine) don’t start automatically after server reboot, even though Startup Type was set to Automatic.

If you want a non-admin user to be able to remotely reboot servers (with shutdown -m command), but don’t have other admin rights, you can achieve this with a single group policy change. If you want this to apply to a single server you can user local group policy, for multiple servers, use global domain…

Sending Rich Text Format (RTF) messages from MS Outlook to the outside world often results in recipients receiving winmail.dat attachments. I have previously written how to resolve this on the client side. If you are an Exchange server administrator you can prevent users from sending RTF messages via your Exchange server globally.

Bumped into a little issue while deploying Adobe Reader DC via Group Policy. Installation was customized using Adobe Customization Wizard (which generates .mst transforms file). All online features, EULA, and similar distractions were disabled. However, on a test machine, after launching Adobe Reader for the first time, “Welcome to Adobe Acrobat Reader DC” message would appear. It basically…

Issue Windows Server 2012 connected to a local domain network reports network type as a “Public Network“. This causes Windows Firewall to block some network services that are expected to work on a domain network (i.e. Remote Desktop).

Windows file association can be changed using Group Policy (User configuration > Preferences > Control Panel Settings > Folder Options  > New > Open With).

Here is a quick way to find out if the user’s password expired and some other useful password-related information (when was the password last set, whether the password is set to never expire):