A bad user profile could happen to any one of your users. It could happen in Windows desktop or on a server. The user will log in and instead of their profile getting loaded, the OS decides it wants to load a temporary profile the the user. The user will a pop up message stating “You have been logged on with a Temporary Profile” and that any changes won’t get saved.
It can be frustrating for the user, for sure. However, once you know where to go to fix it, it’s not too big of a deal.
Why does it happen? Well there are a variety of reasons. It could be corrupt. It could be delayed, likely from an antivirus program, or some service not responding, or many other operations. Once Windows has loaded a temporary profile for a user, it will continue to do so. That user will always load their temporary profile until you fix it.
How to fix it? You can try to reboot the computer. Depending on whether this is a desktop or server, that may or may not be an easy task to try. If that doesn’t resolve the issue, follow my steps below to fix it. It should work in almost all cases.
1. Login as an ‘Administrator’ to the machine.
2. Click the start button
3. Type “reedit” and then right-click on program to ‘Run as Administrator’. Click ‘Yes’ to any UAC pop up.
5. You will see a list of all of the profile names. Two will be named the same, with one of them ending with “.bak”.
The temporary profile does not have the ‘.bak’ at the end of it. The original or “old” profile has the ‘.bak’ at the end of it.
6. Now that we know which profile is which, we need to rename them.
We need to rename the temporary profile by adding a ‘tmp’ to the end of it.
Next we will rename the original profile by removing the ‘.bak’ from the end of it.
7. Reboot the computer to complete the process.
8. Log back in as the affected user and it should now load the original profile.
9. Once the original profile has been restored, as an administrator you can re-open the regedit tool and navigate back to the same entry from “Step 4”. Right-click on the temporary profile that ends in ‘.tmp’ and select “Delete” to permanently remove it.
If the did not help, then your only other option would be to create a new user profile. To do this, you’d need to, as an administrator, delete the user profile before having the user log back onto the machine. Everything such as user documents and files would be lost though. Hopefully you have a good backup of your data that you restore from.
So I’ve seen this a couple times and I always forget how to handle it, so hopefully writing this down will help me remember for next time…
You are replacing some Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) with a newer server, and everything looks good-to-go. Back on your Remote Desktop Connection Broker (RDCB), you have Server Manager open, and you proceed to remove the old RDSH servers. Easy. You then go back to edit other properties in in your RDS deployment and – BAM – you get an error message that states:
The following servers in this deployment are not part of the server pool: 1. <Old.RDSH.ServerName> The servers must be added to the server pool
Powershell to our rescue! On your RDCB, open up a PowerShell window as an Administrator. Run the command below.
PS C:\> Get-RDServer
This will return a list of all the Remote Desktop servers you have in RDCB as well as their installed roles. You should see your old, unwanted, RDSH server in that list. Next, we can enter the command below to remove our orphaned RDSH server.
This will remove the ‘RDS-RD-SERVER’ role. Now if you go back to your RDCB, and back to your deployment, everything should be back to normal. It is no longer expecting the “Old.RDSH.Server” to be a server that Server Manger manages. In fact, at this point you should be able to remove it as a managed server.
Note: RDS is a complicated beast. The above mentioned trick utilizing PowerShell has worked for me the couple times I’ve needed in my scenario. However, your mileage may vary depending on your environment.
With the end of support for Windows 2008, it was time to get those last few lingering services migrated to a new server. For me, one of those lingering tasks was to move our Print Server. This article will take a dive into what you need to do to migrate your Print Server to Windows 2016. This should work for all current versions of Windows Server.
The process of migrating your print server is done by utilizing the Printer Migration Wizard. The wizard tool allows you to export all the drivers, printer settings, and print queues from the source server into the export file. You can then import that file on the destination server, which will add in all those printer resources. The final step I’ll go over will be the removal of the original source print server and setting the new print server to the same name and IP address as the original source server. This is to make it a “seamless” transition on the back-end, so that clients can continue to print without changing any of their settings. They’ll never know you made a change! If you can’t assign you new server with the same name and IP, then you will to reconfigure all of your clients, either manually or via GPO
Configuring your new Print Server
Spin up your new server. Run thru a basic setup and apply any needed updates and patches to it.
Once you have it updated, fully patched, and ready-to-go we can proceed with setting up the Print-Services role by running the following PowerShell command. Install-WindowsFeature Print-Services Next we will start the Print Spooler service with the following commandSet-Service -Name "Spooler" -StartupType automatic Start-Service -Name "Spooler"
Next step is to enable a few firewall rules to allow for you to remotely manage your new server. Enter these commands into your Powershell window; Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "Windows Management Instrumentation (DCOM-In)" Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Remote Event Log Management" Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Remote Service Management" Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Remote Volume Management" Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Windows Firewall Remote Management" Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Remote Scheduled Tasks Management" Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)" Enable-NetFirewallRule -DisplayGroup "File and Printer sharing"
Alright… your new print server is ready to proceed.
Exporting your Source Print Server Settings
On your new print server, start the Print Management console.
From the console, right click on Print Servers, and then click on Migrate Printers.
Select Export printer queues and drivers to a file, then click NEXT.
Enter the name of your source print server, then click NEXT.
You’ll be presented a list of the resources that will be exported, click NEXT.
Select a name and location on your new print server where you want to save your printer export file, then click NEXT.
The export process may take a few minutes to complete. You will end up with all of your printer resources from the source print server in a file. Also, something to note is that it can become a large file. My export file with just over 40 printers was 1.15GB.
Importing your Print Server Settings
From the Print Management console, right click on Print Management, then click on Migrate Printers again to begin the Migration Wizard.
This time we are going to choose Import printer queues and printer drivers from a file, then click NEXT.
Specifiy the path the file you created in the Export task , then click NEXT.
Windows will parse thru the file to load its’ printer objects, and give you a list to review, if it looks correct, click NEXT. Select This print server (\\PrintServerName) and click NEXT. Select Import mode: Overwrite existing printers, and List in the directory: Don’t list any printers , then click NEXT. We select to not list them, because they are already published in Active Directory by the source print server, and we would rather not make duplicates.
Once you have completed the import process, you will be prompted by the wizard to view the event log for any errors that might have happened during import.
If you encountered any “problem” drivers, go ahead and manually install them on your new server now.
Time to Switch Over to the New Print Server
We that we have all of our printers installed on our new printer server, it’s time to proceed with the next steps. Here we need to do three things. First is to remove the printers listed in by the source print server in Active Directory. Next we’ll rename our servers. Lastly we’ll re-add our printers from the new print server back into Active Directory.
On your source print server, open your Printer Management console and select all of your Printers. Right click on them and then select Remove from Directory.
Now proceed with renaming your source print server to something else, and assign it’s original name to your new print server. After our new print server has be given the original server’s name, reboot it so that the name change takes effect. We’re all done with the source print server, and will only be working on the new print server from this point.
Open the Printer Management console and select all of your Printers. Right click on them and then select List in Directory.
This will re-publish all of the printer back in Active Directory and complete our task of migrating the Print Server to a new server. And Viola! Just like that you should be back in business – able to print again until your heart is content or you run out toner, whichever comes first.
I recently had to migrate some services from an old Windows 2008 server to Windows 2016. One of those services was a Network Policy Server (NPS) service, which is used by RADIUS to authenticate users into some more secure resources.
I was kind of dreading the task, as I had no recollection of how I had configured it, some five or more years ago. My initial search on the subject landed me on this Microsoft documentation site, which was very informative. Luckily, the task of exporting and migrating your NPS configuration to import onto another server is quite simple. It can all be done with a few lines at a command prompt and a single XML file.
In Windows 2008 or 2008 R2, you use ‘netsh’. In Windows 2012 and above, you can use PowerShell or ‘netsh’.
Both methods are equally simple, it really just comes down to which version of Windows Server are you migrating from.
Export and Import the NPS configuration by using Netsh
Log into to your source NPS server with your Administrative credentials.
Open a ‘Command Prompt’ as an administrator, type netsh, and then hit Enter.
At the netsh prompt, type nps, and then hit Enter.
At the netsh nps prompt, type export filename="<path>\<filename>.xml" exportPSK=YES Update <path> with the folder location where you want to save your configuraation file. The path can be relative or absolute, or it can be a UNC path. Update <filename> with what you want to name your xml file.
After you press Enter, you’ll see a message showing whether the export was successful or not.
Copy the xml file you created to the destination NPS server.
Open a ‘Command Prompt’ as an administrator on the destinantion NPS. Type the following command, then hit Enter. netsh nps import filename="<path>\<file>.xml" A message will appear to show whether the import was successful or not.
Export and Import the NPS configuration by using Windows PowerShell
Log into to your source NPS server with your Administrative credentials.
Open a ‘PowerShell window’ as an administrator, type the following command, and then hit Enter. Export-NpsConfiguration –Path c:\NPSconfig.xml
There is no message after the command completes, but if you check your path location, you should see your xml file.
After you have exported the NPS configuration to a file, copy the file to the destination NPS server. I’m copying mine to the root of the c:\ so it’s easy to find.
Open a ‘PowerShell window’ as an administrator on the destination server. Type the following command, and then hit Enter, to import your configuration.
