Windows 10 search cannot find any applications

So since installing Windows 10, the search has been working fine.
Now today, When using search to find *any* application it doesn't find shit... seriously, it doesn't registere there are any applications.

Even though indexing is turned on for all the relevant places like c:\program files, c:\users, start menu it doesn't work.

The only thing that does work is a re-installation of Cortana

Firstly, open an elevated powershell prompt (see here if you don't know how) and run the following

Get-AppXPackage -Name Microsoft.Windows.Cortana | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

After that it instantly works.... very annoying or what?
 

List users on a terminal services server

qwinsta /server:servername1

 SESSIONNAME       USERNAME                 ID  STATE   TYPE        DEVICE
 services                                    0  Disc
 console                                     1  Conn
                   bob5                      2  Disc
 rdp-tcp#1         bob4                      3  Active
                   bob3                      4  Disc
 rdp-tcp#4         bob2                      5  Active
 rdp-tcp#0         bob                       6  Active

List installed windows programs on a pc remotely via command line

install the sysinternals process tools from here

psexec \\COMPUTERNAME -u administrator -p password reg query "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall" /s | findstr /B ".*DisplayName"

 voila
Note, there are other methds to query via WMI, but this only works with MSI installed packages.
 

Accessing Windows 2012/2008 shares with sambaclient and NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE

Ok
so we migrated from a Windows 2008 server to Windows 2012, and our automated build system hudson could no longer copy it's files over to the new server.

using smbclient to create a directory on the fileserver, didn't work after we migrated.

smbclient //server01.corp/dfs_shared/ -U username%password

The old file server could authenticate us, with both the hudson account and our domain admin accounts. The new file server couldn't.

we checked:
firewall rules (hardware)
firewall rules (windows)
local policy (Net lanman auto type -v1/v2)

Eventually,

I figured out this worked.

smbclient //server01.corp/dfs_shared/ -U domain\\username%password

The reason being that we were now authenticating against a file server ONLY. The previous server was also a domain controller (which has no concept of a local account). As the new server was a file server only, when it was authing, it was checking against it's local account, which obviously, doesn't exist.

Using Check_mk to check the Disk queue length on a windows server

Add this script to your plugins (name it as diskqueue.ps1 for example). Standard location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Check_mk\plugins

#this check returns both the disk read queue lentgh and the disk write queue length
#for all logical disks on a server in the format:
#<drive letter> <read queue length> <write queue length>

#write check name to host

Write-Host "<<<windisk_queue>>>"

#get all of the drive letters (DeviceID) of all local (DriveType 3) logical disks from wmi
$driveletters = Get-WmiObject win32_logicaldisk -Filter "DriveType='3'" | Select -ExpandProperty "DeviceID"

#get the current value for the disk read and disk write queue length and format to 2 decimal places
ForEach($driveletter In $driveletters){

$diskreadqueuelength = "{0:N2}" -f ((Get-Counter -Counter "\LogicalDisk($driveletter)\Avg. Disk Read Queue Length").countersamples | Select -ExpandProperty "CookedValue")
$diskwritequeuelength = "{0:N2}" -f ((Get-Counter -Counter "\LogicalDisk($driveletter)\Avg. Disk Write Queue Length").countersamples | Select -ExpandProperty "CookedValue")

Write-Host $driveletter $diskreadqueuelength $diskwritequeuelength

}

then add this to your /usr/share/check_mk/checks folder with the same name as the check windisk_queue

#!/bin/python

inventory_process = []
inventory_process_active = []

# the inventory version (dummy)

def inventory_windisk_queue(checkname, info):
    # begin with empty inventory
    inventory = []
    #   print checkname
    for line in info:
        drive = str(line[0])
        read = line[1]
        write = line[2]
        inventory.append ((  "%s" % drive, (read, write)  ))
        #inventory
    return inventory
 

#the actual check
def check_windisk_queue (item, params, info):
    #print item
    #print params
    print info[0][0]
    perfdata = params
    drive = str(info[0][0])
    read = info[0][1]
    write = info[0][2]

    performance =[ ( "Read", read), ("Write", write)]
    return ((0, "No checks implemented - ONLY FOR PERFORMANCE. Read %s, Write %s" % (read, write), performance ))


# checking function, service description, perf data, invenotry function
check_info['windisk_queue'] = (check_windisk_queue, "Disk Q Length",1 ,inventory_windisk_queue)

reinventory with cmk -uII
tada!

Thanks to JJ Clements for the powershell script