Problems with Windows EC2 snapshots - amazon-ec2

I am getting serious access problems every single time I take a Windows snapshot from the EC2 console. After taking the snapshot neither the original machine, nor the images snapshot, are avaialable. And by this I mean that there is no RDP, HTTP or HTTPS connectivity, all of which were accessible ports before the snapshot. There is nothing to explain why this error occurs, as the sys logs are either blank or seem to show a successful snapshot and machine launch. Note that I have also had scenarios where I reboot the machine and again NOTHING is available.
What am I doing wrong? These are the steps I take.
1) Launch a default Win2k8 with IIS7 image. This is my machine: ami-c5e40dac
2) Install .NET 4.0
3) Activate the database (turn on the service).
4) Install my application and the database. This include an HTTPS certificate (I think I read somewhere that Windows has a restart problem if a cert is in the machine store - WTF?)
5) Take a snapshot or reboot --- Bang, everything is dead!
Anyone come across such problems?

I had a similar problem earlier this week; it turned out that my instance was just taking an age to boot (1 hour +).
Is it possible that you had some pending windows updates that wanted to run on startup?

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SCCM uninstalled on clients in organization

In my organization a project has begun to install SCCM on every computer. My job is to filter out computers which do not have SCCM installed on them (that part is done), find out why and try to install.
Unfortunately, I’m inexperienced with SCCM logs and find it hard to locate the problems (if there are any) and there is a huge number of devices I have to check all by myself and accessing each computer’s C$ will take years.
The OS of the problematic computers are Windows 10/7/XP/Server 2016.
Can anyone help me with these issues please?
Thanks in advance
The client install logs on the local machine are here C:\Windows\ccmsetup\Logs. You could script something to pull the logs and dump on a network share.
You can pull the CMTrace.exe from the server install directory to read the logs.
They are most likely failing for the same reason, I would start with looking at the firewall and make sure WinRM is enabled.
There are 3 methods to installing the agent GPO, Login Script, or from the console.

VM & MS access - ExportWithFormatting PDF not working while in background

I have a problem that i have a difficult time explaining, which makes any online search very hard. Here is my dilema.
I'm migrating a VM. The purpose of this machine is to compile send out daily/weekly/monthly reports. I know there are other ways (like Power BI) but this is the situation we are in right now. The older machine has win10 pro and office 365 installed while the new has win10 enterprise version and office 2016 installed. This machine runs 24/7 in the background running specific tasks (via system scheduler app) at given times, that is it's a Virtual machine and has done so without issues since it was created. The reason for the migration is because we need to domain change and bring the machine under a new corporate policy and we don't want to do this on a live server.
We've set it the VM's the same way, same programs and same settings. Everything seams to be running smooth expect for this one thing, and here is the problem i have a hard time to explain or figure out:
MS Access will update the tables and the computer will run the tasks as set but it will not export the data to pdf unless i have a remote desktop connection open. Will not export the pdf's otherwise. MS Access uses a autoexec macro where the pdf export is set with ExportWithFormatting. This works without issues on the old server.
We thought this to be a permission or user specific issue at first but even re-creating the tasks did not work and changing paths. Otherwise also i expect we would have problems with tables updating, specially since it works when you have an active remote desktop conn running.
I'm lost and therefore hoping this community will be able to help or guide me to a solution.
I believe that we found the reason for this. It was caused by windows easy print and the printer drivers of the machine. It worked for some reason differently between the servers. after reinstalling the printer drivers and a few restarts it started working. It exports now from access again.
This is at least solved.

Manipulating time on an azure vm

I have a requirement to change time to a future value and run some queries on my windows server and this machine has to be in azure. I am able to change the time and run my sql queries successfully but after a restart, the azure vm is reverting back the time to default. How would I get around this and keep the manipulated time even after the VM restart OR a stop/start ?
Pretty sure VM in Azure pick time from the host OS using hyper-v integration. You could try and disable that service in the VM, I'm pretty sure that is not supported, but might work. Another thing you can try - use a startup script to modify time.

WDS ImageUnattend does not run

We've successfully set-up WDS (Windows Deployment Services) and had it all working (it's serving an unattended Windows 7 x64 installation, the user only has to F12 then wait for the install to finish) but it no longer works the way it did before.
We're trying to F12 the exact same machine where it used to work. The WDS part of the installation is still automatic (unattended) but ImageUnattend.xml does not seem to run on the client at all now, it gets stuck at the language selection (everything after that is manual as well which is supposed to be automatic).
Inspecting C:\windows\panther on the client machine shows that WDS pops up with an error: WDS CallBack_WdsClient_CopyPrivatesDone: Failed to process client unattend variables.
Changing "%MACHINENAME%" to "*" in the ImageUnattend.xml file makes it all automatic again, however it then renames the computer incorrectly.
The variable %MACHINENAME% worked before, so why does it not work now? Has anyone else met this issue before?
Using a different user (domain administrator) in the ImageUnattend.xml file does not seem to change anything.
After countless of attempts with at least 15 new ImageUnattend.xml files, I decided to restart the server and use the original files I knew worked before.
This fixed it.

Azure VM suddenly unavailable

I've had an Azure VM running fine for years but all of a sudden I can't access it anymore. Not through RDP nor through http.
Nothing changed on my side and Microsoft only gives phone support for 230€/month. What to do?
Maybe it has corrupted? The only two things I can think of are: try connecting over Powershell to see if it will respond; You could pull it down from storage and launch the console locally to see what is going on? Azure as you may know doesn't offer a console access. The only other option is to rebuild it assuming you have backups etc.
Ok, finally put the money down and got it up again. The advice on the phone was to upgrade from A2 to A3 processor/memory specs. This would force the VM to go to another machine, ruling out problems with the hardware / NIC. This worked but was quite expensive. They will get back to me next week with the exact problem report.

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