Our company in moving into Amazon WorkSpaces. We all currently have normal desktop computers winning Windows 7. There are a couple of us who will need local windows and will also be working in the WorkSpace. There are others who will only need to work in there Amazon WorkSpace environment. Is there a way to automatically boot the workspace instance upon windows loading and then when the instance is closed it will shut down windows. Essentially denying those users access to the local copy of windows.
Would also need a way for an administrator to access the local Windows..
Thanks
Looks like what i am trying to do is available in a function that Windows provides. I will look into the functionality of the "Kiosk" function that is available in Windows 7.
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I'm new to Docker and started to read the official documentation & googled around the internet but couldn't find conclusive answer.
I'll describe my situation, I have a program (in C++) that runs as a service on Windows 10 Pro and have configuration details in windows registry (regedit).
Currently if I want to debug it I have a virtual machine of Win 10 Pro and use remote debug.
The reason I don't debug it on my machine is because my program always runs on my machine as a service and I don't want to stop it, also on the VM I edit/change the registry configuration.
So I was thinking using Docker instead of VM, but a question has arisen:
Is it possible to edit the container registry without changing/harming the host machine registry?
Thanks in advance for the help.
There is passing mention in Microsoft Docs:
While a container shares the host operating system's kernel, the container doesn't get unfettered access to it. Instead, the container gets an isolated–and in some cases virtualized–view of the system. For example, a container can access a virtualized version of the file system and registry, but any changes affect only the container and are discarded when it stops. To save data, the container can mount persistent storage such as an Azure Disk or a file share (including Azure Files).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/about/#how-containers-work
I have two virtual machines running in google cloud. They both run MS Server 2012.
It appears that the person who created them used a clone as the machine SID's are the same. This is now causing a problem for things such as WebRoot AV which identify the machines using the SID.
In AWS this is resolved by using the AWS sysprep tool, how can I get solve this s the Google environment?
Thanks all.
Sysprep tool is a built-in tool that comes with windows itself. So i would suggest you run sysprep by following this guide. Note that this wipe out anything installed on your VM.
I have installed QAD Netui Client (application with .exe executable) on Windows EC2 instance.
I would like to access that application through web browser or by any other way without the need of logging-in into windows instance.
The reason behind this requirement is that, I don't want users to get information about machine on which my application is installed.
Is there any way to achieve this requirement ?
Not likely. This appears to be a Window GUI application rather than something like a web application.
As a GUI application it needs a Windows desktop session to run. This is accomplished with remote desktop or other similar application that allows you to share a desktop with another client.
However, you can set up a Windows user profile that has much more restricted access to the machine. This is probably the closest you will get.
I have successfully captured an image using sysprep and can provision new machines from it, however all the custom user settings are missing (desktop shortcuts, chrome bookmarks etc...).
A more serious issue is that one of the applications I had installed fails on the provisioned machine unless run as administrator (due to the way it writes some files when being installed originally).
How can I ensure this profile information is preserved and I don't hit the permissions issue for the application?
I have been pointed at the following link (http://theitbros.com/sysprep-xp-sp3-copy-administrator-profile/) but it seems to be Win XP specific.
Profile information can be migrated to a new deployment using the User State Migration Tool (USMT). USMT is a free tool designed to help IT Professionals migrate files and settings to Windows 7 or Windows 8. USMT captures user accounts, user files, operating system settings, and applications settings and then migrates them to the new Windows installation. The TechNet articles ‘Step-by-Step: Basic Windows Migration using USMT for IT Professionals’ and ‘User State Migration Tool 4.0 User’s Guide’ are good places to start learning how to use USMT.
For your application issue, I would recommend using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) for your deployments. MDT can deploy your image and then install device drivers and applications to the machine automatically. These two video walkthroughs are specific to migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 with MDT, and using USMT to migrate the user files and settings:
Part 1: Building the Deployment Environment
Part 2: Initiating the Install and Migrating the PC
There is also a Microsoft Virtual Academy 7 part course titled ‘Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7’ that has two parts dedicated to using USMT to transfer user data and one part for MDT.
MDT can be downloaded here, and USMT is a part of the ADK which is a component of MDT.
Hope this helps,
The answer here wasn't very elegant (in my mind at least) but here is what I did to achieve the desired result:
Create the VM as usual (specifying the admin user during setup)
Create a new (non-admin) user and give them RDP access
Log in as the non-admin user
Install all the necessary software
Log in as the admin user, change the permissions for any files that were causing an issue to be readable by the non-admin user
Run sysprep as the admin and complete the process as detailed elsewhere
This gave me an image that I was able to provision VMs from. When creating the VM I specified the admin user to be created (but then never needed to login as the admin, as I would just login as my non-admin user that was created before). All profile settings for the non-admin user are preserved.
Hope this helps anyone else facing the same issue.
I'm switching over to EC2 and obviously it's easiest to manage instances through a command line rather than some crappy web interface, but I work on a PC and have everything set up in Windows. What is the best way to work with dev server instances? Putty? Is there an alternative? What do you guys use?
Thanks!
It depends what you mean by "manage instances".
If you mean the ability to launch new instances from an AMI, configure security groups, manage EIP's and so on, the ElasticFox plugin to Firefox is great (in spite of having occasionally buggy releases). The command line tools supplied by Amazon for this purpose could be a good basis if you're writing automated scripts, but I find ElasticFox much better for my work.
To work directly on the instances, I use WinSCP for both Windows and Linux instances (I installed a third-party SFTP server for Windows), PuTTY for Linux and Remote Desktop for Windows.
I manage both Linux and Windows EC2 instances for a couple of different businesses.
For the Windows boxes I normally connect via Remote Desktop to do virtually everything. For Linux I use WinSCP and PuTTY consoles.
For EC2-specific operations I use the Amazon web console or the Amazon-supplied scripts from my PC.