As we’ve come to expect from new versions of Windows Server, Windows Server 2016 arrives packed with a huge array of new features. Many of the new capabilities, such as containers and Nano Server, stem from Microsoft’s focus on the cloud. Others, such as Shielded VMs, illustrate a strong emphasis on security. Still others, like the many added networking and storage capabilities, continue an emphasis on software-defined infrastructure begun in Windows Server 2012.

The GA release of Windows Server 2016 rolls up all of the features introduced in the five Technical Previews we’ve seen along the way, plus a few surprises. Now that Windows Server 2016 is fully baked, we’ll treat you to the new features we like the most.

Here are several features that you can get from Windows Server 2016:

Nano Server

Nano Server boasts a 92 percent smaller installation footprint than the Windows Server graphical user interface (GUI) installation option. Beyond just that, these compelling reasons may make you start running Nano for at least some of your Windows Server workloads:

• Bare-metal OS means far fewer updates and reboots are necessary.
• Because you have to administratively inject any server roles from outside Nano, the server has a much-reduced attack surface when compared to GUI Windows Server.
• Nano is so small that it can be ported easily across servers, data centers and physical sites.
• Nano hosts the most common Windows Server workloads, including Hyper-V host.
• Nano is intended to be managed completely remotely. However, Nano does include a minimal local management UI called "Nano Server Recovery Console," shown in the previous screenshot, that allows you to perform initial configuration tasks.

Containers

Microsoft is working closely with the Docker development team to bring Docker-based containers to Windows Server. Until now, containers have existed almost entirely in the Linux/UNIX open-source world. They allow you to isolate applications and services in an agile, easy-to-administer way. Windows Server 2016 offers two different types of "containerized" Windows Server instances:

• Windows Server Container. This container type is intended for low-trust workloads where you don't mind that container instances running on the same server may share some common resources
• Hyper-V Container. This isn't a Hyper-V host or VM. Instead, its a "super isolated" containerized Windows Server instance that is completely isolated from other containers and potentially from the host server. Hyper-V containers are appropriate for high-trust workloads.

Linux Secure Boot

Secure Boot is part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification that protects a server's startup environment against the injection of rootkits or other assorted boot-time malware.

The problem with Windows Server-based Secure Boot is that your server would blow up (figuratively speaking) if you tried to create a Linux-based Generation 2 Hyper-V VM because the Linux kernel drivers weren't part of the trusted device store. Technically, the VM's UEFI firmware presents a "Failed Secure Boot Verification" error and stops startup.

Nowadays, the Windows Server and Azure engineering teams seemingly love Linux. Therefore, we can now deploy Linux VMs under Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V with no trouble without having to disable the otherwise stellar Secure Boot feature.

ReFS

The Resilient File System (ReFS) has been a long time coming in Windows Server. In Windows Server 2016, we finally get a stable version. ReFS is intended as a high-performance, high-resiliency file system intended for use with Storage Spaces Direct (discussed next in this article) and Hyper-V workloads.

Storage Spaces Direct

Storage Spaces is a cool Windows Server feature that makes it more affordable for administrators to create redundant and flexible disk storage. Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016 extends Storage Spaces to allow failover cluster nodes to use their local storage inside this cluster, avoiding the previous necessity of a shared storage fabric.

ADFS v4

Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is a Windows Server role that supports claims (token)-based identity. Claims-based identity is crucial thanks to the need for single-sign on (SSO) between on-premises Active Directory and various cloud-based services.

ADFS v4 in Windows Server 2016 finally brings support for OpenID Connect-based authentication, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and what Microsoft calls "hybrid conditional access." This latter technology allows ADFS to respond when user or device attributes fall out of compliance with security policies on either end of the trust relationship.

Nested Virtualization

Nested virtualization refers to the capability of a virtual machine to itself host virtual machines. This has historically been a "no go" in Windows Server Hyper-V, but we finally have that ability in Windows Server 2016.

Nested virtualization makes sense when a business wants to deploy additional Hyper-V hosts and needs to minimize hardware costs.

Hyper-V Server has allowed us to add virtual hardware or adjust the allocated RAM to a virtual machine. However, those changes historically required that we first power down the VM. In Windows Server 2016, we can now "hot add" virtual hardware while VMs are online and running. I was able to add an additional virtual network interface card (NIC) to my running Hyper-V virtual machine.

PowerShell Direct

In Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V administrators ordinarily performed Windows PowerShell-based remote administration of VMs the same way they would with physical hosts. In Windows Server 2016, PowerShell remoting commands now have -VM* parameters that allows us to send PowerShell directly into the Hyper-V host's VMs!

Invoke-Command -VMName 'server2' -ScriptBlock {Stop-Service -Name Spooler} -Credential 'tomsitprotim' -Verbose

We used the new -VMName parameter of the Invoke-Command cmdlet to run the Stop-Service cmdlet on the Hyper-V VM named server2.

Shielded VMs

The new Host Guardian Service server role, which hosts the shielded VM feature, is far too complex to discuss in this limited space. For now, suffice it to say that Windows Server 2016 shielded VMs allow for much deeper, fine-grained control over Hyper-V VM access.

For example, your Hyper-V host may have VMs from more than one tenant, and you need to ensure that different Hyper-V admin groups can access only their designated VMs. By using BitLocker Drive Encryption to encrypt the VM's virtual hard disks, shielded VMs can solve that problem.

This is great feature in Windows Server 2012 and I found this interesting article from MSDN about App Suspend on Windows Server 2012. So, I decide to copy this article from msdn. Thanks to msdn.

App Suspend is a new hosting configuration in Internet Information Services (IIS) in Windows Server 2012 R2. The only requirement is that your app is running on the .NET Framework 4.5.1, which comes with Windows Server 2012 R2. No code changes are required. It’s literally as simple as the flip of a switch. Let’s take a look at that switch.

How to enable ASP.NET App Suspend

Enabling ASP.NET App suspend is pretty easy, in Internet Information Services Manager. As I wrote earlier, this setting is set on an app pool basis. Here’s what you need to do.

Open the IIS Manager

Right-click on an app pool – you’ll see the context menu

Select “Advanced Settings …”

You will see the Advanced Settings dialog. The “Idle Time-out” settings are the important ones to look at for this scenario, particularly the “Idle Time-out Action”. The default for that setting is terminate.

Change the “Idle Time-out Action” to Suspend, as you see below. Your app pool is now configured for ASP.NET App Suspend.

You will probably want to test out this feature. You could wait the entire 20 minutes, however, I suggest that you temporarily set the time-out to 1 minute, for testing purposes. Do remember to switch it back.

Monitoring site suspension

You can validate that an app was suspended in the event viewer, in the Application event log. Search for event 2310. You can see an example event, below.

Done.

Sometimes you will receive this error message on Windows Server 2008:

The ‘Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0′ provider is not registered on the local machine

As you know, this is just simple problem. IIS on Windows Server 2008 was running its application pool in 64 bit mode. There are no 64 bit Jet drivers. Simply changing the application pool to run in 32 bit mode enables support for the 32 bit Jet drivers.

To do this right click on the target application pool in IIS, select Advanced Settings and change Enable 32-Bit Applications to True.

If you want to check that you have the latest version of the Jet drivers goto c:\Windows\SysWOW64, right click on the Msjet40.dll file, select the details tab and view the version number. At the time of writing the latest version was 4.0.9704.0. You can view more details on this process at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/239114.

Hope it help!

A common question that is often asked is how to auto-magically redirect HTTP requests for your web sites to HTTPS. Simply put, if someone types “http://www.yoursite.com” how can you redirect that request to “https://www.yoursite.com”?

For a complete look at how URL Rewriting works, take a look at the following MSDN article on URL Rewrite. Then look at the following as an example of what to add to your web.config:

<rewrite>
  <rules>
    <rule name="Redirect to HTTPS" stopProcessing="true">
      <match url="(.*)" />
      <conditions>
        <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="^OFF$" />
      </conditions>
      <action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}" />
    </rule>
  </rules>
</rewrite>

Today I will show you how to solve problem in send message when you host with hosting provider. This is the error message:

The SMTP server requires a secure connection or the client was not authenticated. The server response was: host5.vdconline.vn ESMTP MailEnable Service, Version: 5.51-- denied access at 02/03/12 02:45:26

Please try this solution below:

Public Shared Sub SendEmail(  


    Dim Message As New Net.Mail.MailMessage() 

    Dim FromEmail As New Net.Mail.MailAddress(“From Email Address”)
    Message.From = FromEmail
    Message.To.Add(“To Email Address”)  


    Message.Subject = “Subject of the Email”
    Message.Body = “Body of the Email”
    ‘Message.SubjectEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8
    ‘Message.BodyEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8
    ‘Message.IsBodyHtml = False
    ‘Message.Priority = Net.Mail.MailPriority.High 

    Dim SmtpClient As New Net.Mail.SmtpClient(“smtp.YourEmailServer.com”, PortNo eg: 587 for gmail )
    SmtpClient.EnableSsl = True
    ‘smtp.DeliveryMethod = Net.Mail.SmtpDeliveryMethod.Network
    ‘smtp.UseDefaultCredentials = False 

SmtpClient.Credentials = New Net.NetworkCredential(“YourEmailAddress”, “YourEmailPassword”) 

    SmtpClient.Send(Message)  


End Sub

Note: An important point to note is that you have to set the EnableSSl to True before you set the NetWork Credentials of your SMTP client.

This is the error message that sometimes you can find on IIS:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition=’MachineToApplication’ beyond application level.  This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.

I will gonna show you how to fix this issue. What is the issue?

1. When you create an new web application using visual studio.net, it automatically creates the virtual directory and configures it as an application. However, if you manually create the virtual directory and it is not configured as an application, then you will not be able to browse the application and may get the above error. The debug information you get as mentioned above, is applicable to this scenario.

To resolve it, Right Click on the virtual directory - select properties and then click on "Create" next to the "Application" Label and the textbox. It will automatically create the "application" using the virtual directory's name. Now the application can be accessed.

2. When you have sub-directories in your application, you can have web.config file for the sub-directory. However, there are certain properties which cannot be set in the web.config of the sub-directory such as authentication, session state (you may see that the error message shows the line number where the
authentication or sessionstate is declared in the web.config of the sub-directory). The reason is, these settings cannot be overridden at the sub-directory level unless the sub-directory is also configured as an application (as mentioned in the above point).

Mostly we have the practice of adding web.config in the sub-directory if we want to protect access to the sub-directory files (say, the directory is admin and we wish to protect the admin pages from unathorized users).

But actually, this can be achieved in the web.config at the application's root level itself, by specifing the location path tags and authorization, as follows:-

<location path="Admin">
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow roles="administrators" />
<deny users="*" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</location>

However, if you wish to have a web.config at the sub-directory level and protect the sub-directory, you can just specify the Authorization mode as follows:-

<configuration>
<system.web>
<authorization>
<allow roles="administrators" />
<deny users="*" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</configuration>

Thus you can protect the sub-directory from unauthorized access.

If you wish to use the mailboxes for a specific domain name with an external mail server, you can easily do that by following these steps:

1. Go to Domains, click the Domain Name.
2. In the Web Site group click DNS Settings
3. Now in the record type column, locate MX record, and click the respective link in the Host column on the left.
4. Next, in the enter mail exchanger box, type the external mail server’s name and click OK.
5. Click Up Level to return to the Domain Management screen.
6. Now click Mail Accounts and Mail Settings.
7. Clear the Activate mail service on domain check box and click OK.

Your domain will now use an external mail server.

If you would like to block a website from being viewed on your Windows computer, follow these steps:

1. You need to run C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

2. Then, backup the hosts file.

3. Open hosts file there from the notepad.

4. At the end of the line you can see as per below.

127.0.0.1 localhost

5. Append the following line at the end

127.0.0.1 BlockSitename.com # replace the BlockSitename.com with the site name that you want to block.

6. Then go to Start->Run-> type ipconfig /flushdns

In this tutorial, I will show you how to use Traceroute on your Windows. Please go to Startà Runà Cmd. Then, you must type tracert, give a space then add your domain name. See this example below:



IP Whois – Also pronounced as Who is, this tool is more often used to know information about the IP address of a particular domain, its location and the details about the registrar and owner. It basically is a query and response protocol used extensively to lookup to databases holding information about registered users of an Internet resource.

Reverse DNS lookup – Also referred to as the rDNS, it is mandatory to have it on your server. It is used for determining the association of a domain name with a particular IP address using the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet.

SPAM DB Lookup – This tool enables server administrators to look for the possible accounts on server to be included in the spammers list. Spam DB lookup enables them to check if the server and its IP’s have been added to the list due to a possible spamming activity carried out by someone using the server.

DNS Lookup – DNS lookup is used to determine various DNS records such as A, MX records, CNAME etc. for a particular domain. Using this simple tool, one can check where a particular site is hosted.

Yesterday, we have just talked about how to connect FTP with Web Browser. In this tutorial, I will show you the error message that sometimes shown when we connect with Filezilla. This in a common error message that you will find on Filezilla:

Failed to retrieve directory listing.

Here is the image:



As the image shows, the connection enters Passive (PASV) Mode and after that, the error occurs. A solution that could work, is to disable passive mode. Here’s how you do that in FileZilla:

- Open Filezilla, go to Edit -> Settings
- Click on Connection -> FTP: Choose Active
- Click on Connection -> FTP -> Active Mode: Select "Ask your operating system for the external IP address”
- Click on Connection -> FTP -> Passive Mode: Choose Fall Back to Active Mode
- Press OK.



Hope it helps. Good luck