Dropbox build 1.5.12 – Two-Step Verification

The New Experimental Build 1.5.12 of the Dropbox desktop applications introduces two-step verification for all Dropbox accounts.

Two-step verification adds an extra layer of protection to your account by requiring an additional security code that is sent to your phone by text message or generated using a mobile authenticator app.

1. Make sure you have the latest forum build (1.5.12) installed.
2. Visit the following url to try this feature (may require you to sign in to the website): Two-step verification
3. The link should send you to the Security tab for your account. In the “Account sign in” section near the bottom of the page, find the new “Two-step verification” option. Click the “(change)” link to begin the setup process.

Dropbox advices to unlink & relink your account after enabling two-step verification.

SCOM 2012 – Overview of installed Patches for Agents

After installing a Cumulative Update Rollups for SCOM 2012, you want to check if the patches are installed on all you agents. You can just use the following PowerShell command to have a clear overview of the installed patches sorted by PatchList name;

get-scomagent | sort {[string] $_.PatchList} | select Name, PatchList

Within SCOM 2007 the Get-SCOMAgent was Get-Agent; for What’s New on PowerShell Commando’s type. Open “Operations Manager Shell” and paste the following within the box;

get-help about_opsmgr_whatsnew

ReFS – New file system in Windows Server 2012

In this blog post I’d like to talk about a new file system for Windows. This file system, which Microsoft calls ReFS (Resilient File System), has been designed from the ground up to meet a broad set of customer requirements, both today’s and tomorrow’s, for all the different ways that Windows is deployed. Although it is designed to be better in many dimensions, resiliency stands out as one of its most prominent features.

NTFS, the New Technology File System, first shipped on Windows NT 3.1 when it was introduced in 1995 but didn’t make its way to the desktop until Microsoft retired the Windows 9x code and shipped Windows XP in 2001.

The key features of ReFS are as follows (note that some of these features are provided in conjunction with Storage Spaces).

– Metadata integrity with checksums
– Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity
– Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates
– Large volume, file and directory sizes
– Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy
– Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance
– Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors
– Resiliency to corruptions with “salvage” for maximum volume availability in all cases
– Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing

Windows 8 client is able to access and read ReFS volumes until it’s fully supported in client operating systems in the future, but now:

– You can not convert data between NTFS and ReFS
– You can not boot from ReFS in Windows Server 2102
– ReFS can not be used on removable media or drives
– The NTFS features not supported in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.

To learn more about ReFS file system, click here.

Windows 8 Activation – Error code 0x8007232B

After installing the Windows 8 Enterprise (RTM Build 9200), I noticed the following error during the Windows Activation.

Activation Error: Code 0x8007232b
DNS Name does not exist

This error occures because the Volume versions can activate against a KMS-enabled machine in your corporate environment or against Microsoft online servers using a MAK. If a volume-licensed media was used for the install, a product key needs to be set.

Enter the following in a CMD prompt with elevated rights (replace xxx with you own product key)

slmgr -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx

Lost in Group Policies?

Ever got lost in thousands of Group Policies? I know I do.. A new application, operating system or add-on, I’m always searching, like crazy. Until I found this little helper:

MSDN Group Policy Searcher

The site also contains a Search Provider for Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 as well as a Search Connector for Windows 7.

This is new for me, but it has been around the web for quite some time: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2010/06/24/announcing-the-group-policy-search-service.aspx