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.
The corona virus and COVID-19 are at the top of everyone’s mind right now. The whole world is trying to deal with this pandemic. States are issuing stay-at-home orders and just about every company is trying to figure out how to allow their staff to work from home. The least that a tech nerd like me can do is contribute a few clock cycles towards the research that will hopefully help to bring about an end to all this madness.
Folding@Home (F@H) is a project focused on disease research thru distributed computing power. They get folks like you and I to share our otherwise unused computer power (when our PCs sit idle) to solve calculations that help them get answers to their medical questions about proteins and disease. The more people that set-up the Folding@Home client in their Home-Labs or on that spare laptops/PCs laying around their house to contribute towards their project, the bigger the distributed supercomputer we create. How cool is that!
Before the global COVID-19 outbreak F@H had roughly 30,000 users globally that contributed their spare compute power. In the past couple weeks, that number has surged. They have over 400,000 users that are now contributing and that number keeps growing daily. The F@H project is now at over 470 PetaFLOPs (FLOPs = floating point operations per second) of raw compute power. That makes it over twice as fast as the fastest supercomputer in the world (2019). Not only that, but it is faster the the top seven supercomputers combined. Combined! That’s equivalent to the horsepower of 27,433,824 CPU/GPU cores. I can’t even fathom that. They are predicting that F@H will soon reach exaFLOP levels. That’s a billion billion operations per second. Totally crazy!
While F@H 1,200%+ increase in contributors and associated surge in demand has temporarily lead to a shortage of work units, the F@H team is working to expand and increase their capacity to serve units. In F@H terms, work units are the smaller bits of a larger workload, and are what is actually sent to each user.
It takes just minutes to setup. They have clients for Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as support for both CPUs and GPUs. Once it is setup, it’s effortless on your part and just runs in the background.
Now that you are ready to contribute, the first step is to create a passkey. The passkey will identify you and will allow FAH to assign you work units. To create your passkey, use the link below.
Just to let you know, when I signed up this week, it took a few hours for me to receive my passkey from F@H. So don’t get upset if you don’t hear from them immediately after clicking “Get Passkey”.
Once you have your Passkey, follow one of my posts (coming soon!) below to install and deploy the Folding@Home client on your system.
VMware is doing their part to help make it easy for folks to contribute to the Folding@Home (F@H) project. They have packaged together an appliance as an OVA file on VMware Flings that you can deploy on any of their virtualization products either on your hardware or in a cloud, using Workstation or Fusion, or ESXi hosts. That means that with just a few clicks you can download and deploy a VM running on the super light-weight PhotonOS that has the F@H client pre-installed and is ready-to-go.
You might be asking why this is so great, I mean the client isn’t exactly difficult to setup on other operating systems. Well you are correct. This fling is geared towards VMware virtualization enthusiasts and professionals that already have homelabs or datacenters, with idle compute power they want to contribute. By using those idle resources and dedicating an VM appliance towards contributing, it basically becomes a set-it-and-forget-it deal that will always be chugging along in the background.
If you are new to virtualization, then deploying this appliance can serve as a great way to learn about flings, appliances, and deploying a VM in general while contributing to a cause.
Note: If you intent to deploy this in your company’s data center, or your work pc/laptop, you should make sure to have permission to allow for it from the appropriate people in your organization before deploying, just to cover your ass.
Step 1: Create your Passkey
If you don’t already have a username and passkey, then the first thing you’ll need to do is create your user and get your passkey. You’ll use this later as you deploy the appliance. If you already have yours, then proceed to the next step.
Just to let you know, when I signed up earlier this week, it took a few hours for me to receive my passkey from F@H. So don’t get upset if you don’t hear from them immediately after clicking “Get Passkey”.
1. Double-click on the OVA file you download to launch VMware Workstation. It will present you a wizard to “Import Virtual Machine”. Enter a name and file path for your F@H appliance, then click ‘Next’.
2. Now to work down the options from the left pane…
-Enter a hostname -Enter an IP address (leave blank if DHCP) -Gateway -DNS
-Enter password for the appliance; VMware1! *This is the root password for the appliance
-Enter you F@H username -Enter your F@H team (Leave as 52737 to contribute as part of VMware’s team) -Enter your Passkey -GPU (If using a GPU change to TRUE, if you are using a virtual machine with a GPU, this must be in passthrough mode) -Enter F@H management networks info (can probably leave alone) -F@H password defaults to the OS password (VMware1!)
Then click ‘Import’.
Go ahead and use my F@H username & passkey if you really want to fold as me… It just means my F@H user will get credit for any folding you do.
3. Once the import is complete, it should automatically power on. Go ahead and power it off. The first thing I recommend to do is upgrade the VM.
Click on “Upgrade this virtual machine” and follow the wizard to upgrade it to the highest version that is compatible in your environment. For me, it is Workstation 14.x.
Because this is an OVA file and so easy to re-deploy if I screw something up, I choose to just alter the VM, and not make a clone.
4. Next step is to edit the VM and add more CPUs, if desired. Click on “Edit virtual machine settings”.
Click on ‘Processors’. From the “Number of processors” dropdown you can choose how many processors you want to dedicate to this appliance. Then click ‘Ok’.
5. Go ahead and power on your F@H appliance.
ESXi / vCenter
1. In vCenter or on your ESXi host, right click on your Datacenter/Cluster/Host and select “Deploy OVF Template”.
2. Select the OVA file you downloaded earlier, and click ‘Next’.
3. Give your VM appliance a name, and click ‘Next’.
4. Walk thru the rest of the wizard. Choose your computer resource you wish to deploy it on to. Review the details. Select your storage. Select your network.
5. Customize the F@H template setting for your environment. -Hostname -IP address -Gateway -DNS -OS ‘root’ password -F@H username -F@H passkey -GPU -F@H remote management password
Then click ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’ to deploy your new appliance.
6. Once deployed, make sure the vm is powered off. Right click on the vm and select ‘Edit Settings…”. Select CPU and from the dropdown adjust the CPU to the desired number you wish to dedicate to your appliance, and click ‘Ok’.
7. Power on your F@H vm and you are ready to start contributing.
Step 4: Troubleshooting
Once your appliance is up and running, there are a few command that you will find helpful.
Start and Stop /etc/init.d/FAHClient start /etc/init.d/FAHClient stop Restart /etc/init.d/FAHClient restart Status /etc/init.d/FAHClient status Check the Logs /etc/init.d/FAHClient log -v Check CPU stats top
With the huge growth of contributors to F@H, it has made getting work units more difficult. If you check your logs and see messages similar the what is in my screenshot below, then your appliance IS working, it is just waiting for work.
Leave it running and you’ll eventually see it start chugging along when it gets a work unit.
Also, on the F@H fling website you can also find two PDFs, one about deployment and another with FAQs. Give those a look if you run into any other issues.
The Folding@Home (F@H) team has released v7 (currently v7.5.1) of their F@H software. It has a newer simpler graphical interface aimed at making it easier for people to install and contribute to the project. Here is how to make it run on your Linux computer. Linux has been growing in popularity as a desktop OS, so it’s great to see projects like this include it as a viable platform for contributing to F@H.
2. Click on the “fahclient_7.5.1_amd64.deb” installer.
2. Allow the file to open with the default software installer.
3. Click the ‘Install’ button.
4. Enter your password, if asked, to allow the F@H client to get installed.
5. Enter your F@H user and passkey, then click ‘Next’. *Make sure to check the box to automatically start the FAHClient.
6. The install itself should be really quick.
7. Open a browser on your Linux machine and in the address bar go to: 127.0.0.1:7396
It will open the F@H webgui where you can watch your work progress or adjust settings.
8. Just like that you are contributing to F@H! The client will be running as a service in the background.
I know that I left my F@H username and passkey in my post. Go ahead and use my F@H username & passkey if you really want to… It just means my F@H user will get credit for any folding you do.
The Folding@Home (F@H) team has released v7 (currently v7.5.1) of their F@H software. It has a newer simpler graphical interface aimed at making it easier for people to install and contribute to the project. Here is how to make it run on your Windows computer.
2. Double-click the file to start the installation. If an UAC prompt is displayed, click ‘Yes’ to continue.
3. Click ‘Next’ on the Welcome screen to continue.
4. Read and accept the license agreement by clicking ‘I Agree’.
5. You have two options, do the ‘Express install’ or the ‘Custom install’. I am going to click the ‘Custom install’ to be able to have a bit more control over the installation.
6. Choose the install folder destination. I’m leaving it as the default.
7. Choose the folder for your data. Again, I’m leaving it as the default.
8. You have three choices as to when you want F@H to start; (1) At login, (2) As a service at boot, or (3) manually. You also have the option to enable a F@H screensaver.
9. Click ‘Finish’ to complete the installation.
Running F@H
1. If the F@H client did not launch or is already installed, click on it’s icon on your desktop or in your start menu.
2. The first time F@H runs, you will likely see a popup message from Windows Firewall, asking to grant F@H network access.
3. It will open the F@H in your broswer. Once open, click on the link to ‘Change Identity’.
4. Enter your F@H username, passkey, and team you want to be associated with.
5. After you have entered your user info, you can see your points earned and work units you have been assigned. That’s it! You are now contributing to F@H.
I know that I left my F@H username and passkey in my post. Go ahead and use my F@H username & passkey if you really want to… It just means my F@H user will get credit for any folding you do.
I had originally thought that by setting the timezone on a Bitnami server that WordPress would then pull and use that time info. Oh, I was so wrong! It wasn’t a bad exercise, as at least I’ll be able to better read my logs in a more “timely” manner. LOL. But it turns out that setting the timezone info for WordPress is much simpler and doesn’t involve any need to console in or SSH to the server. Lets get started…
Log in with an account that has admin privileges to your WordPress dashboard. In the dashboard menu that is on the left side, navigate to “Settings” then click on “General”
The fifth item down from the top of this page is “Timezone”. Use the dropdown menu to select your desired timezone. Then click the “Save Changes” button at the very bottom of the page. I’m choosing “Honolulu” as my desired timezone.
That’s it! Your WordPress posts will now all reflect the local time you chose as your timezone. It couldn’t be any simpler than that!
Having the correct timezone configured on your machine can save you a lot of “math headaches” when you try to comb through the machine’s event logs. It’s a pretty easy thing to configure in the overall scope of all things, yet it is one that is often over looked, even by veteran users. Never fear though… I will show you how you too can update your Bitnami instance to your preferred timezone.
Lets begin by logging in with ‘root’ priviledges to your Bitnami instance. Once logged in, use the following command to see what timezone you are currently set to use.
date
As you can see in my example, I am currently set to the UTC timezone, also known as Universal Time.
To find our desired timezone and reconfigure this, we need to enter the following command.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
Once you’ve entered the command above and hit ‘Enter’ it will launch a menu were we can find and select your desired timezone. I will changing my Bitnami instance to use the ‘Pacific\Honolulu’ timezone, also known as HST.
Once you click ‘OK’, the machine will show you that it has updated it’s clock to use your desired timezone.
You can further verify that your clock is set correctly by running the ‘date’ command again, just as we had at the beginning of this post.
date
Just like that, we have updated the timezone preference in Bitnami. It was simple to do just as i promised. No more “math headaches” for us when we read log timestamps!!!
NOTE: If you are just trying to update your timezone for WordPress that is running on Bitnami, then check out this post of mine: WordPress – Set Timezone
PhotonOS is VMware’s minimalist Linux based OS that has been heavily optimized for vSphere environments. Many of VMware’s appliance and OVAs are based on this super light weight platform. The problem with appliances and OVAs, is that I have yet to find or launch one that is set to MY timezone by default. I guess that is the price I have to pay for living in Hawaii.
While having the timezone mis-configured probably won’t hurt the VM itself most of the time, it definitely makes reading timestamps and logs more difficult. I mean come on, we’ve all been there before, add or subtracting your timezone offset to figure out what time an event actually happened since we probably don’t live in the GMT or UTC timezones. Much to our luck, setting the timezone PhotonOS using SSH (or the console’s CLI) is pretty easy after you log in as ‘root’.
Enter the command below to get a list of all available timezones.
ls -lsa /usr/share/zoneinfo | more
If you live in a region that is divided into subregions, such as the ‘Pacific’, we can use the following command instead to list those zones.
ls -lsa /usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific | more
Once you have found the name of your desired timezone you can use the following command to set it. I’m using “Pacific/Honolulu” as my desired timezone.
set Pacific/Honolulu timezone
Then make a symbolic link from localtime to “Pacific/Honolulu”, or your desired timezone…
Cisco Call Manager is an integral part of any company that runs it for all of their “voice” or telephony services. I’ll be honest… I’m always a little afraid to console in and do stuff on a CUCM server because I don’t feel like I know enough to quickly troubleshoot issues I might cause.
However that doesn’t mean that I can avoid CUCM all together. I do have to jump into a CUCM server occasionally. Like when it’s been virtualized and it’s time to update the version of VMware Tools (VMTools) that is running on it. Thankfully, that task is a lot easier than it might initially seem. I’ll demonstrate how to upgrade the VMTools on a server running CUCM v10.5.2.
In vCenter, select your CUCM server. Dropdown the ‘Actions’ menu and select ‘Guest OS’. Then click on “Install VMware Tools…”.
You’ll see a pop-up message, click ‘Mount’. This will make vCenter mount the VMTools iso in your virtual machine so that the guest OS can access the installer.
Now, login into your CUCM vm’s console as an admin, and enter the following commands.
admin: utils os secure permissive
admin: utils vmtools refresh
You will be prompted that the tools install will reboot the machine twice. Press ‘y’ and hit ‘Enter’ to continue….
If vmtools has not ever been installed on this vm, or if the install didn’t complete, you might see a message that stating that you need to manually restart the server. If so, enter the command it shows to finish the intsall by rebooting the server.
admin: utils system reboot
After the reboots are finished, log back in as admin to your CUCM server. Enter the following command.
admin: utils os secure enforce
That’s it! Your VMtools have been updated. The updated guest OS info should now be visible when you look at this CUCM vm in your vCenter.
So another gotcha when using O365 in hybird mode with on-prem sync is that you can’t hide a user’s email address [from address books and distribution lists] by using the Exhange Admin Portal. This is because the setting are made on-prem, and those defined values are simply pushing to your AAD tenant in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
We used to be able to, from the Exchange Management Console on the on-prem server, just open the user and check a tick box to hide their address from everything. The work around isn’t much harder, it’s just buried deeper.
Open the user in your on-prem AD, and navigate the “Attribute Editor” tab.
Scroll down until you find the following attribute.
msExchHideFromAddressLists
Setting it to “TRUE” will make the email addess hidden.
Setting it to “FALSE” or “<not set>” will make the email address visible.
After you have made the desired change to the value of the attribute, you just need to wait for [or force] your on-prem AD to re-sync with your AAD.
