Heya folks, Ned here again. I just published a survey for IT Pros on Group Policy Preferences Drive Map. It's just a few minutes of your time, totally anonymous (unless you want to talk more) and could help make your life easier someday ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. I just published a survey for IT Pros on Offline Files (aka "Client-side Caching", aka "CSC"). It's just 5 minutes of your time, totally anonymous, and should help us make your life easier someday. Your feedback is invaluable ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. Starting in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25276, the Pro editions of Windows now disable SMB insecure guest authentication fallbacks by default.    Guest logons don't require passwords & don't support standard security features like signing and encryption. Allowing ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. There is a performance regression in 22H2 when copying larger files from a remote computer down to a Windows 11 computer. A large (multi-GB file) might see as much as 40% less throughput over SMB when copying down ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. Back in the spring of 2022 we released a new SMB preview feature: the SMB authentication rate limiter. It is available in Windows 11 Insider and Windows Server Insider builds. IT staff often enable access to the SMB server service ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. As you know from a previous post, we released an end-to-end SMB compression capability with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. You can learn all about it at SMB Compression | Microsoft Docs.    There was ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. A customer contacted us about a strange behavior they were seeing when copying large files to a Windows Server 2019 cluster using SMB 3.1.1. Around every 5GB transferred, the copy would temporarily pause for a few seconds, then ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. As you might have heard now in all the MS Ignite hullabaloo, Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition is now generally available and that means that SMB over QUIC is now generally available too! I ... continue reading

Create thinly provisioned volumes in Windows Admin Center Thin provisioning is a standout feature exclusive to Azure Stack HCI 21H2 and offers flexible capacity management. With thin provisioning, storage is allocated when needed and volumes can be over-provisioned (size larger ... continue reading

Heya folks, Ned here again. As you’ve heard by now, Windows Server 2022 is available and supported for production deployments. This new OS brings many new features around security, storage, networking, web, containers, applications, virtualization, edge, and Azure hybrid. Today ... continue reading