28 December 2025

What’s your MAC?

You find yourself talking to your network administrator and they need to know what your Windows machine MAC address is. Your device might be blocked, or they are helping you troubleshoot some layer 1 issue… How do you quickly find, fetch, and retrieve your MAC address?

I’m sure some of you would dive into your device properties, find your network adapter, and start looking at it’s hardware properties. Some of you would run an “ipconfig /all” and then look through that text dump to grab your physical address. Others would go through ‘Windows Settings’ or the ‘Control Panel’ or use PowerShell or other similar methods to find it.

Yes, there are many ways to find it. But there is only one truly quick way to grab all of your Windows Device’s MAC addresses. You are just going to open your terminal, it doesn’t matter if your preference is Command Prompt or PowerShell, and run the “GetMac” command. This will pull up every MAC address on your device, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. No sorting through a wall of text with information you don’t need. Just your MAC addresses as a list, table, or csv. Let take a look below. 

getmac /v

This will be the default command you use to get a verbose view of all of your MAC addresses. All at once with the connection name to make it easy to identify the desired NIC.

Variations of the command that you would use to return a list, table, or csv are:

getmac /v /FO list
getmac /v /FO table
getmac /v /FO csv

Believe it or not, this command has been around since Windows XP! Comment below if you knew that, if you have used it before, or if you are just learning about it today.

Category: Microsoft, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 2012/2012R2, Windows 2016, Windows 2019, Windows 2022 | LEAVE A COMMENT
27 February 2020

Server Manager – Orphaned RDS

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.

PS C:\> Remove-RDServer Old.RDSH.ServerName RDS-RD-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.

Category: Microsoft, PowerShell, Windows 2012/2012R2, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | LEAVE A COMMENT
23 January 2020

Migrating NPS Configuration

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.

Import-NpsConfiguration -Path "c:\NPSconfig.xml"

Category: Microsoft, Networking, PowerShell, Windows 2012/2012R2, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | 9 Comments on Migrating NPS Configuration