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Archive for Windows 2012 R2

Samsung 850 EVO SSD crashes Windows 2012 R2 Server

by KW · Comments (0)

Jul 06 2015

I have personally used Samsung’s 850 SSD drives in a few workstations, and they appear to work great.

However, there are several recent posts of Windows 2012 R2 and 2012 R2 Essentials servers crashing. The common denominator? Samsung’s 850 EVO SSD drives.

One person wrote that a 2012 R2 Essentials server will produce 100% crashes. Any other 2012 R2 server will crash if the write cache is disabled, which happens when a server is promoted to a DC. Hopefully, it’s a firmware issue with those drives that Samsung can address. Also, the Samsung 840 SSD drives appear to work just fine, and does NOT cause similar crashes.

Here are some links for your further reading pleasure that identify the issues at hand:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/81c6d52f-578c-44c8-a6ec-18c03a818295/cant-promote-server-2012-r2-to-domain-controller-get-error-0xc000021a?forum=winserverDS

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/ebc71806-37ab-49c4-9218-9964b30d958a/0xc000021a-during-server-2012-r2-essentials-setup?forum=winserveressentials

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/869314-warning-do-not-use-samsung-850-evo-ssd-with-windows-server-2012-r2

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Categories : Essentials, News, Servers, SMB

Tags : Essentials, SSD, Windows 2012 R2

Windows 2012 No Remote Desktop License Servers Available

by KW · Comments (0)

Mar 26 2014

Customer site is running Windows Server 2012 Essentials and a Windows 2012 Terminal Server. User contacts me to report that she was unable to connect into the Terminal Server from Remote Web Access (RWA). I tried, and got the same error message when I tried to access the Terminal Server:

The remote session was disconnected because there are no Remote Desktop License Servers available to provide a license. Please contact the server administrator

I knew it was not an RWA issue because I could RWA into the 2012 Essentials server. A quick search and I found a post that indicates that there is a bug with 2012 RDS session hosts where they will not look to the licensing server for CALs when the grace period ends. Although I would like a permanent fix, the following solution resolved the crisis at hand.

The solution is to delete a specific registry key relating to the grace period, and then reboot the server.

Open up the registry editor on the Terminal Server
Browse down to: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM
Make a backup copy of the GracePeriod registry key
Then you can Delete the GracePeriod registry key
Note: if you are not able to delete the key, you need to give yourself permission:
Right click on the GracePeriod key and assign ‘full control’ permission to the administrator account.
You should then be able to delete the key.
Reboot the server and check it out.