It seemed like a simple question: Can you figure out what’s in an ESD file without download the whole file? I’ve been manipulating data like this quite a bit over the past […]
What’s actually in a WIM or ESD file?
What is the Windows Server 2022 Datacenter Azure Edition, and how does it do Azure AD Join?
Microsoft started talking about an Azure-specific version of Windows Server 2022 back in 2021. So what is it? As Orin’s blog post describes it: Windows Server Azure Edition is a special version […]
Troubleshooting UEFI boot entries: how #5 is 4th
Some days things just go in a different direction than you expect. In today’s troubleshooting exercise, I had to figure out why a PC wasn’t booting as expected to a new UEFI […]
Connect the dots: Create your own hashes
My previous post was to figure out the format of an Autopilot (OAv3) hash. But there’s more to that intellectual exercise than the exercise itself, because I wanted to be able to […]
Connect the dots: Reverse-engineering an Autopilot hash
I previously posted details on breaking down an Autopilot hash (really, an OAv3 hash as these aren’t Autopilot-specific), leveraging the OA3TOOL.EXE utility in the ADK to convert the hash into a printable […]
Connect the dots: Remediating the Autopilot hardware hash
It’s a common problem: You send a PC off for repair and it comes back with a different hardware component and is no longer recognized as an Autopilot-registered device. In an attempt […]
Connect the dots: From hardware hash to Autopilot profile
In my previous blog post about the hardware hash used with Windows Autopilot, as well as in the official documentation, it mentions that the exact algorithm for identifying a machine isn’t documented. […]
Geeking out with the UEFI boot manager
It seems like every time I need to work with UEFI, it turns into a multi-day affair involving reading spec documents and source code examples. And this time is no exception. The […]
Geeking out: Offline domain join
Way back in 2009, with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, a new feature was added called “offline domain join” (ODJ for short). Initially, the feature wasn’t understood […]
Geeking Out: Network booting
When we started working on Tanium Provision, one of the things we needed to build was a mechanism to do network booting. It’s fine to boot from a USB key (and necessary […]
How does UEFI boot from a CD?
In a past post about UEFI, I talked about the boot process: The UEFI firmware looks for a FAT32 disk volume that contains a specific file, e.g. EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi, and it loads that […]
Trying out Proxmox VE, an open-source virtualization platform
I had a specific need (more on that later) that could be satisfied with solutions such as QEMU (an open-source machine emulator that can do all sorts of interesting things) and KVM […]
Geeking out with UEFI, again
Last year, I published a blog that got into a fair amount of depth on UEFI that was surprisingly popular, both at the time I posted it and again last month after […]
Turn your laptop into a portable mainframe
Way before working with Windows, I started off in IT as a database administrator and systems programmer, working on IBM (and later Amdahl) mainframe systems running the MVS operating system, CICS transaction […]
Geeking out with UEFI
Some people may think some of my past posts get into the weeds, exploring the technical depths of Windows Autopilot, Intune, Windows 10, ConfigMgr, etc. But I would say those generally only […]
Out of Office Hours 