David Vielmetter

Adventures in stupid technology

  • Dell, Microsoft, and Realtek audio

    It’s been a whilwind of the poopy kind in terms of audio communication for computers running Windows 10/11 if your system has any kind of realtek drivers. There were a number of security issues affecting realtek drivers and software so vendors and Microsoft tried to fix them. This led to a too many cooks in…

  • Right-click on desktop yields spinning wheel indefinitely on Windows 10

    This is an interesting issue affecting workstations with dual graphics adapters usually Intel and Nvidia if one of the driver packages for the graphics adapter is not installed properly. [the problem] When a user right-clicks on the desktop in Windows 10 (any build), the cursor turns to a spinning wheel and does not display the…

  • Outlook offline address book (OAB) fails to download after Exchange upgrade

    Everything went swimmingly (mostly) performing an upgrade of Exchange 2013 to 2019 except for the OAB on existing Outlook profiles. Oddly enough, reprofiling fixes the issue, but with logs of mapi profiles to configure,n that was not an option. [the issue] Microsoft Outlook (most versions) show the following error when manually attempting to update the…

  • Check size on individual large folders in Google Drive

    One common feature that’s simply not implemented in Google Drive is individual folder size properties. So if you’re trying to determine how large a specific folder in your Google Drive is, then that can be difficult. While it’s true that with Google File Stream, you can get info on a Google Drive folder to display…

  • Windows 10 VPN connection hangs at Connecting

    Windows 10 has had sporadic issues with its own implementation of the Microsoft (builtin) VPN client connecting L2TP IPSEC based VPN connections that utilize strongswan at the server end. This issue has affected builds 1709-1903. [problem] The VPN connection (when launched from the notification area) just says Connecting and never gets established. Eventually the following…

  • MFA in office 365 finally just works (mostly)

    Microsoft has finally managed to get modern authentication to work in the latest updated versions of Office products included with Office 365 (Except for Skype for Business – which is being discontinued anyway). Here’s a quick start guide on how to get it up and running: You’ll need an Office 365 subscription, a computer running…

  • Ubiquiti Unifi cloud key error generating backup file

    The other day I was helping a friend troubleshoot an issue with his Ubiquiti Cloud Key. At issue was the Unifi Controller itself and in his specific case it just happened to be running on a Cloud Key. [The problem] When attempting to generate and download a controller backup, the following error is displayed: There…

  • Windows 2016 Server Evaluation cannot be activated with a valid product key

    If you’re thinking you can simply activate your evaluation of Windows 2016 server at the end of the evaluation period using a key matching the edition of your eval server you’re about to have a stressful evening. Here’s what’ll happen if you try to activate an Evaluation of Windows 2016 Server Standard using a brand…

  • Redirected printers missing from control panel but show up in applications

    This has been bugging me for a long time. The story goes like this: Customer reports that for some users printers don’t appear to be redirecting but the issue is intermittent. After a lot of trials and tribulations I finally find a Windows 10 Pro systems which reproducibly fails to to redirect printers to both…