Samba Active Directory: Troubleshooting Windows GPOs, RDP and Logon Rights
A practical Samba AD homelab case study covering Windows Group Policy, Remote Desktop, firewall rules, local administrator permissions, secedit, SIDs and gpresult.
Category Windows
Windows guides covering troubleshooting, Group Policy, Active Directory, scripting and system administration in Realm Labs.
Building a Raspberry Pi PXE Server with Synology NAS Storage for Windows Deployment
I wanted a cleaner way to deploy and recover Windows machines without carrying USB installers around. This is how I split PXE boot services onto a Raspberry Pi while keeping WinPE, Windows images and deployment files on my Synology NAS — including the DHCP, TFTP and port 69 problems I hit along the way.
Building a Web-Managed Active Directory Profile Picture System with PowerShell, GPO and Docker
Changing a Windows account picture on one computer is simple. Changing it reliably for multiple domain users, across multiple domain-joined computers, while retaining central control is a slightly different problem. I wanted a system where profile pictures could be administered…
Deploying Custom Domain User Profile Pictures with Group Policy
I wanted domain users on my order.realm network to have their own Windows account pictures automatically applied when they log on to a domain computer. Which version should you use? This guide covers the foundational PowerShell and Group Policy deployment,…
Domain User Can’t RDP: Fixing “Not Authorised for Remote Login”
Remote Desktop is one of those Windows features that usually either works immediately or sends you down a permissions rabbit hole. This particular problem came up in Realm Labs when I had a Windows machine joined to the order.realm domain…
Cleaning Up Years of Mapped Drive GPOs with %USERNAME%
One of the things I like about running Active Directory at home is that it gives me somewhere to experiment with the same sort of problems that appear in much larger environments. Mapped drives are a perfect example. They start…
The GPO That Broke Group Policy: WireGuard at Windows Startup
This one was painful because the symptoms made it look like the entire domain was falling apart. I had a Windows domain environment running in Realm Labs and wanted domain-joined machines to automatically bring up a WireGuard tunnel at startup.…
Deploying Applications with Group Policy: MSI Packages, PowerShell Startup Scripts, and the Problems We Hit
Windows Group Policy makes it possible to centrally deploy applications to domain-joined PCs, but the traditional Software Installation policy has an important limitation: it is primarily designed around Windows Installer packages (.msi). During this project I wanted domain computers to…
Setting Up Hyper-V on Windows: Virtual Networking and VM Deployment Guide
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s native Type-1 hypervisor built directly into Windows. Whether you are building a local dev environment, testing new operating systems, or setting up dedicated homelab services, Hyper-V offers bare-metal virtualization performance without needing third-party hypervisors like VMware Workstation…
How to Fix “Object Not Found” and Missing Servers in Hyper-V Manager
Your Hyper-V virtual machines can continue running normally while Hyper-V Manager shows an empty host, refuses to connect, or reports that an object could not be found. When the guests are still reachable through SSH, RDP or their hosted services,…