Category: Windows 8

Get the username of a person logged onto a computer remotely using PowerShell and WMI

John 2 Comments

So recently I was out visiting a customer who had issues with someone hammering their internet.  We enabled netflow on their Cisco router to do a show top-talkers.  Once we got an IP address we were able to find the machine, but not who.  So I quickly entered the following into PowerShell and got the person we were after (change COMPUTERNAME to the target machine name).

Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem -ComputerName "COMPUTERNAME" |
Select-Object -ExpandProperty UserName

You will need to have admin rights on the target machine for the above to work.

Another way you can do it is to use wmic to achieve the same result, enter the below into a command prompt window, changing COMPUTERNAME to the target machine;

wmic.exe /node:COMPUTERNAME computersystem get username

Hope that helps someone out.

Update WSUS 3.0 SP2 to support Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 Clients

John Leave a comment

Just a quick one today.  Microsoft have released an update for those running WSUS 3.0 SP2 which allows you  to provide updates to clients running Windows 8 and Server 2012.  The update is available at this Knowledge Base Article for both 32 and 64 bit environments.

Also, no word yet on when they will be releasing a patch for the IE flaw (see here and here), but should be available over the next few days.

Upgrading your current KMS Server (Server 2008 R2) to support Windows 8 and Server 2012 activation

John 24 Comments

If you’re in an enterprise environment, chances are that you have a KMS server running (usually either Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2).  So now that Windows 8 and Server 2012 has hit VLSC for SA customers you’ll most likely want to begin testing and performing pilot deployments but we need to get our Key Management Server to accept these new clients.  If you have tried to activate your KMS keys with existing KMS hosts you will receive the following error message:

Error: 0xC004F050 The Software Licensing Service reported that the product 
key is invalid.

Thankfully for us, Microsoft has released an update that will upgrade Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 KMS Hosts to support Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, you can view the KB article by clicking here (KB2691586).  You will need to request the hotfix from the KB.  Once downloaded, open up an elevated command prompt and execute the update (which acts as a windows update package).  When it finishes installing you will need to restart your server.

Now that our server is back up, we need to replace the KMS Host key with one for 2012 or Windows 8.  Open an elevated command prompt and enter slmgr.vbs /upk which will show us Uninstalled product key successfully when complete.  Now we install our new key with slmgr.vbs /ipk product-key-here

You should now be presented with a product activated successfully window.  You can also run
slmgr.vbs /dlv and under description you should see VOLUME_KMS_2012.  Now you can start to activate your new Windows 8 and Server 2012 clients.