Prior to Windows Server 2012 I had used all manners of NIC teaming software in order to properly team my adapters. Each vendor seemed to have their own method and installer. I had seen options from broadcom, HP, Dell and all of them seemed to have their flaws. With the introduction of Windows Server 2012, however, Microsoft took it upon themselves to simplify the teaming process and I 100% approve of their decision:
Being the type of person who constantly likes to install, uninstall and otherwise mess with my computers basic functionality I run across a ton of really awesome issues. One such issue occurred a few months ago when i lost my optical drive. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, most everything I own is in the cloud, but I was burning music from my last few remaining CDs and felt like this might be an issue for me. (NOTE: one of the reasons this probably occured was due to the installation and uninstallation of CD burner software - ed.). So I went digging and found a fix for my most recent of problems:
When working on a script this past week I came across a problem when trying to discover a servers domain when not being afforded access permissions. In my case my usual steps all came back with non-usable information. All FQDN names were exactly the same for the computers on the our "test" domain as well as our "active" domain. All powershell scripts failed to run, due to my permissions, and without a major call to our service desk's API there seemed to be no other viable option for pulling this information. That's when I came across an older operation that fit the bill perfectly.
Nbtstat, according to Microsoft's technet library
is designed to help troubleshoot NetBIOS name resolution problems. When a network is functioning normally, NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) resolves NetBIOS names to IP addresses.Long story short (this explanation doesn't seem short...I think you mean long story longer..I'm so clever -ed.) the TCP/IP stack doesn't understand "flat names" so Windows relies on an application called NetBIOS-Over-TCPIP (NBT) to handle them. When I refer to flat names I'm referring to the friendly names assigned to the computer aka Computer Name.
As with all things scripting you can easily find the entire list of variables for the command by running nbtstat -?
This information can be used however you would like. For my purposes I used regular expressions and Powershell to pipe the information into a variable and used that to verified information for several different functions.
I like to keep up to date with the latest Microsoft technologies and generally have a number of test environments running on my home computer. These test environments grant me the ability to create different "virtual" machines each with their own unique Operating Systems and programs without effecting my main computer. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit through a Window Server 2016 preview and thought I might like to get my hands on the new fledgling OS to see what I could glean from it. This is the first part of a multi part series running through the setup of a virtual environment on Windows 10 and the installation of Windows Server 2016 Essentials Tech Preview 3 on the newly established Hyper-V environment.