TinyBorders for Win8 replaced with Winaero Tweaker

I posted a while back about a nice little utility I use on all my Windows 8.x systems to reclaim those lost pixels from Win 8’s giant, padded borders.

It’s recently been replaced with a new tool, Winaero Tweaker, link: http://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836

A new feature with Winaero Tweaker allows you to change colors, which is nice when working with Windows Server 2012 R2.

If you try to change the color you’ll see this:

 

Winaero Tweaker launches with an error in Windows Server 2012 R2, but it doesn’t seem to affect the programs ability to change border size or color.

As you can see, I changed the color from cyan to a light purple, shown in the Winaero Tweaker page

 

 

 

 

Windows 10 Hyper-V: Installing Linux in Gen2 VMs

Important Notes:

Firmware:

Disable Secure Boot

SCSI Controller:

Add a DVD drive for your ISO file

Windows 10 Hyper-V: Setting up Networking Shared and Bridged Options

Update:  It’s now a lot easier to create networks (using PowerShell) in Windows 10 Hyper-V:  https://smudj.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/adding-nat-to-hyper-v-in-windows-10-and-higher/

Update 2:  Windows 10 now creates the Default Switch automatically, which is a non-configurable NAT virtual switch for Hyper-V.

Update 3: If you need a configurable NAT router, see step 2 shown here: https://smudj.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/the-poor-techs-hyper-v-lab-setup/ 

 

 

 

******Deprecated****** 

I do not recommend this method any longer.  Use one options from the updates above

Update: Build 10586.3–Loopback adapter was missing, added back, and checked Hyper-V Extensible Virtual Switch.  This seems to happen with each build update.  A reboot may also be required.

This procedure shows you how to set up bridged and shared (NAT) networking with a single physical network card.

Standard Bridged Networking

1. Start the Hyper-V Manager and click Virtual Switch Manager
2. Select External and click Create Virtual Switch
3. Enter Bridged or similar to identify this network as being on your physical network
4. Select the correct network adapter under External network, this should be an active network card, i.e. one that is connected to your network and your host is using.
   1. If you only have one network card, verify that Allow management operating system to share this network adapter.
   2. If you have multiple network cards, and want to use this card exclusively for VMs, uncheck Allow management operating system to share this network adapter.
5. Click OK and the new virtual switch will be created.
6. Verify that you don’t have any ongoing network tasks before clicking yes, as your network connection will likely be disrupted when the virtual switch is created.
7. This will create a network adapter under Network Connections called vEthernet (name_used), in this case, vEthernet (Bridged)

Shared Networking

Manually add a loopback adapter

1. Open a cmd prompt with Administrator privileges.
   1. Type cmd, right-click on the search result and click Run as administrator
2. Type hdwwiz and press enter
3. 
4. Click Next to start the wizard.
5. Select Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced), and click
6. Highlight Network Adapters, and click Next.
7. Select Microsoft from the Manufacturer column and Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter from the Model column and click Next.
8. 
9. 1. Click Finish to complete the wizard.
   2. Open Network Connections (CTRL+X and select Network Connections), locate the newly created loopback adapter, right-click it and click Rename, and rename it from Ethernet 2 or Ethernet 3 to Loopback.

Create the Shared Virtual Network Switch in Hyper-V

1. Open the Hyper-V Manager and click Virtual Switch Manager
2. Select External and click Create Virtual Switch
3. Enter a descriptive name, like Shared or NAT. This will create a network adapter under Network Connections called vEthernet (name_used), in this case, vEthernet (Shared)
4. Select the Loopback adapter under the External Network selection box, click OK, then click Yes, this operation will not disrupt your host networking.

Connect the Loopback Adapter and Virtual Switch to the Network

1. Open Network Connections (CTRL+X and select Network Connections)
2. Click Change adapter settings
3. Right-click and select Properties on the vEthernet (Bridged) network adapter created under Standard Bridged Networking.
4. Click the Sharing
5. Click Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.
6. 
7. Select the Shared network connection, it should be listed as vEthernet (Shared), or whatever name was used in place of Bridged.
8. Click Ok.

Note:  The Hyper-V networking is very fragile here, and you may need to reboot if you get errors when trying to connect and share the connections.

Here’s the completed Network Connections Window, note the Bridged and Shared Hyper-V adapters. Apologies for the pixelation, the Hyper-V Manager is not 4K screen friendly.

Here’s two VMs using the Shared networking, note, the 192.168.137.x network, the default used by ICS.  Also shown is a third VM using the host network and the host’s IP.

Windows 10 Hyper-V: Accessing ISOs from a Network Share

Keeping ISOs on a server/network share is a great way to save space for all your installation ISOs.  Unfortunately, Hyper-V does things a little different (it’s called constrained delegation) and can’t directly access an ISO file on a network share or mapped drive with your user account.  Hyper-V will ignore any mapped drives you’ve got, but with Windows 10 you can add a network location from Windows Explorer’s Computer tab (1). This makes it easy to get to a remote network share quickly.

You’ve got 2 options:

1. Go to the ISO location and mount it as a physical drive. This tricks Hyper-V into thinking the disk is local and not network shared.  It works great for everything but Gen2.
2. Constrained delegation configuration
   1. On a domain: this is easy, you just need to add your Hyper-V computer’s domain joined account to the network share.
      1. Go to the shared drive/folder and right-click–>Properties.
      2. Click the Sharing tab, click Advanced Sharing.
      3. Click Permissions, click Add.
      4. Click Object Types and select Computers, click OK.
      5. Enter the computer’s name, and click Check names, click OK to add.
   2. Workgroup/Microsoft accounts: this is a little more involved and care should be taken if this is used anywhere other than a home or lab network as you’re changing some security settings
      1. Go to Administrative Tools–>Local Security Policy, in Security Settings–>Local Policies–>Security Options change these settings:
         • Network Access: Do not allow anonymous enumeration of SAM accounts and shares – Change to: Disabled
         • Network Access: Let Everyone permissions apply to anonymous users – Change to: Enabled
         • Network Access: Restrict anonymous access to Named Pipes and Shares – Change to: Disabled
         • Network Access: Shares that can be accessed anonymously, add the name of the share on the Windows server, i.e. if the share name is “ISOs” add “ISOs” here. *I don’t have a non-Windows NAS, if you do and have found a solution for this, please let me know and I’ll post it

 

Footnote (1)

Notes:

• Add a network share:
  1. Open This PC via the start menu, or Win+E.
  2. Click Computer, click Add a network location
  3. 
  4. Follow the Add Network Location Wizard to finish
     1. For a standard Windows share, use the syntax: \\servername\sharename replacing with the actual name of the server and share.

**Content created and tested on Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview Build 10074

VirtualBox 4.3.28 Released

Download: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

 

This is a maintenance release. The following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: fixed a Guru Meditation when rebooting certain guests (for example Solaris doing fast reboot) by fixing the implementation for INIT IPI
• VMM: added some information for diagnosing rare VERR_VMX_INVALID_VMXON_PTR Guru Meditations (VT-x only)
• GUI: HID LEDs sync: prevent synchronization if VM window has no focus (Windows and Mac OS X hosts only)
• GUI: fixed drag and drop moving the cursor between guest screens on certain hosts
• 3D: fixed a crash on restoring the VM state on X11 hosts (bug #12737)
• 3D: fixed a crash on Linux guest shutdown (bug #12772)
• VRDP: fixed incompatibility with rdesktop 1.8.3
• VRDP: fixed listening for IPv6 on some systems (bug #14038)
• Storage: don’t crash if creating an asynchronous I/O context fails (e.g. when starting many VMs) and show a proper error message
• Floppy: several fixes
• Audio: improved the behavior of the volume control for the HD audio device emulation
• USB: increase the number of supported drivers from 3 to 5 (Windows hosts only)
• PS/2 keyboard: synchronize the LED state on VM restore (Windows and Mac OS X hosts only)
• NAT Network: when running multiple NAT networks with multiple VMs, only stop the respective services when stopping VMs (bug #14090)
• NAT: don’t kill UDP bindings on ICMP errors (bug #13475)
• NAT: bandwidth limit now works properly with NAT (bug #11485)
• BIOS: fixed the returned size value of the VBE 2.0 PMI function 0Ah (4.2.0 regression; bug #14096)
• Guest Control: fixed parameter quoting in Windows guests (bug #13157)
• Webcam passthrough improvements for Linux (V4L2) hosts to support more webcam models
• API: don’t fail starting a VM with VBOX_E_INVALID_OBJECT_STATE under certain conditions (bug #13617)
• API: be more verbose on VBOX_E_INVALID_OBJECT_STATE if a medium is attached to a running VM (bug #13560)
• API: fixed a bug which could result in losing certain screen resize events with multi-monitor guests
• rdesktop-vrdp: fixed path to the keymaps (bug #12066)
• rdesktop-vrdp: switch to version 1.8.3
• Windows hosts: more hardening fixes (e.g. bugs #14051, #14052)
• Linux hosts: another fix for activated SMAP on Linux 3.19 and newer (Broadwell and later; bug #13961)
• Linux hosts: Linux 4.1 compile fix (bug #14081)
• Solaris hosts: fixed using of VNIC templates with Crossbow based bridged networking to be compatible with vanity interface names
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed crash during VM termination under rare circumstances
• Windows Additions/WDDM: improved video memory utilization and allow more/bigger guest screens with large resolutions (including HiDPI)
• X11 Additions: prevent flickering when updating mouse cursor
• Solaris Additions: fixed incorrect usage of ‘prtconf’ while installing Guest Additions (Solaris 10 only)