Tag Archives: Windows Server 2012 R2

Server Essentials 2012 & 2016 Can’t Email Health Reports

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This morning I noticed I was missing a bunch of the health reports from my servers that were running Server Essentials 2012 or 2016.

I opened the Dashboard on one of the servers and found these errors. . . . Cannot Send Mail and Windows Server Essentials Management Service is not running. 

I went into Services, like the error message suggested, but the Windows Server Essential Management Service was still running.

Server Essentials Unable to Email Health Report

I did a little digging and I found that apparently there is a bug in the Server Essentials software and when Daylight Savings Time occurs the server no longer can email health reports.  Continue reading →

How to Add “Desktop Experience” to Remote Desktop Session on Windows Server 2012 R2

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I setup a Windows Server 2012 R2 remote desktop server today. I wanted to add the desktop experience for the remote desktop users. I couldn’t seem to find the role I needed to install. After a little research, I found it is actually quite simple to do. Here is how to add desktop experience on a Server 2012 R2

Open Server Manager > Add Roles and Features > Role-Based or Feature-Based InstallationServer 2012 Role Based Installation

Next select the server that you want to add this feature to. Continue to hit next until you come to the “Features” installation screen.  Scroll down the available features until you find User Interfaces and Infrastructure. Expand the menu and Select Desktop Experience.Desktop Experience Server 2012 R2

Click the box beside Desktop Experience and go through the rest of the prompts to install this feature. You may need to reboot your server to finish installation. That is all there is to it!

If this tip helped you, please follow me on Twitter @techspeeder and follow my YouTube Channel. This was posted by techspeeder.

Hat Tip: GD Bloggers

Configure Email Notification for Windows Server 2012 Windows Backup

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I can’t find anywhere in the Windows Server 2012 (R2) settings to allow an email notification when a server backup completes successfully. Windows Server 2012 Essentials has a nice feature that you allows you to get email reports on your backup status. This helps keep tabs on your server without logging in everytime. I wanted a similar notification for when a Windows Server 2012 backed up successfully.

After some research online this is how I found to accomplish this task.

Part One of Tutorial

Lets create a Powershell script. This script will allow us to send email.

Use this Powershell script. Please note your username and password isn’t encrypted. There are ways to encrypt your password but the following tutorial doesn’t show you how to.

$EmailFrom = “notifications@somedomain.com”
$EmailTo = “me@earth.com”
$Subject = “Notification from XYZ”
$Body = “this is a notification from XYZ Notifications..”
$SMTPServer = “smtp.gmail.com”
$SMTPClient = New-Object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($SmtpServer, 587)
$SMTPClient.EnableSsl = $true
$SMTPClient.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential(“username”, “password”);
$SMTPClient.Send($EmailFrom, $EmailTo, $Subject, $Body)
Just change $EmailTo, and username/password in $SMTPClient. For the credentials don’t include @gmail.com in your username.

Thanks to Christian Muggli for this script.

Log into your Gmail account and make sure two factor authentication is turned off. Also make sure less secure apps are enabled. Visit this site https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps to find out if it is enabled or not. If it isn’t enabled you will get this error message.

Powershell SMTP Server ErrorThe SMTP server requires a secure connection or the client was not authenticated. The server response was: 5.5.1 authentication required. Continue reading →

QuickBooks Pro 2015 Occasionally Asks for Administrator Credentials

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We installed QuickBooks Pro 2015 on a terminal server running Windows Server 2012 R2. Quickbooks would work great for the most part, but once in a while Quickbooks would prompt for an administrator password.QuickBooks UAC Prompt Our customer called us about this issue so we decided to give his user account administrator Windows credentials on the terminal server. It didn’t go very long till he called us back again and told us that Quickbooks was still prompting for an administrator password. QuickBooks Database CredentialsAfter doing some research, this is the fix that worked for me.

Go to your start menu and type in Services.msc. Open Services and scroll down till you Continue reading →

Printers don’t Appear under Devices and Printers on Windows Server 2012 R2

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A client of ours uses remote desktop services on their Windows Server 2012 R2. They wanted to be able to print to their network printer from a remote desktop session. I found the printer and installed it and printed out a test page. Everything looked fine until I went under Devices and Printers and mysteriously the printer was nowhere to be found. I decided to open Printer Management, and expected to find them under there. There were no printers to be found underneath Print Management as well.

Quickbooks was installed on the server, so I decided to open that to see if any of the printers showed up underneath that. I went to print something and sure enough the printers showed in Quickbooks and I could print fine out of QuickBooks.

Solution: I did some research online. I found on this forum that a Windows Update was released for Server 2012 R2 that gave some people printer problems. The update that was causing this issue was KB2995388. My server was running Windows Server 2012 R2 so I decided to check my installed updates. Sure enough, KB2995388  was installed. I clicked the Continue reading →