Information about Meraki Licensing

 When renewing your Cisco Meraki Licensing, it should be done within a few weeks.  I have gotten conflicting information from the sellers and the technical support at Meraki.  According to the Meraki support rep, the license is active from the date of the invoice.

Hello Trevor,

As a reminder, the license key is active from date of invoice complete which was xx/xx/2022. When the license is added to the organization it will have a license start date from xx/xx/2022. If the license is added as a renewal today, the co-termination date would be xxx xx, 2025 (the organization will absorb the current remaining 88 days). I would suggest to add the license as soon as possible.

You may always contact your Meraki Account Manager if you had any questions or concerns about your licensing or order; **** ****@cisco.com

Thank you again, 

Cisco Meraki Support

So if you apply the license where can you find your keys?  Well that can be found in the change log.  When you apply your license you can restore your old license by clicking on the undo arrow at the far right (shown below highlighted in yellow).

You will get a popup with a key you can add to update your license.  If however you miss or close the popup without getting your key you can get the key from the change log.  The key is labelled as an unclaimed license.

You will want to select the latest generated value as shown below

This is an ongoing issue here is a link to a reddit thread where someone had a similar issue.

https://www.reddit.com/r/meraki/comments/e9r1dg/burned_by_meraki_cotermination_licenses_and_they/

RDP Periodically Freezes in Windows 10 and Windows Server

I work with windows a lot and have found I had been having connection issues with Remote Desktop on most of my Windows Servers and some Windows 10 Machines.  After some research I found that Windows Server version 1809 (2022) and Windows 10 versions 1806 - 21H2, I have had issues with Remote Desktop freezing.  I would have several stints where the RDP client froze on my workstation or computer I am remoting in from.  This wasn't the only computer that was having an issue.  Another user which also had remote desktop on a workstation (for specific reasons) had also been intermittingly been having the same issue.  I also found that in some instances AV also causing some issues.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/664026/2022-rds-session-freezing-randomly.html

https://blog.techinline.com/2021/01/08/remote-desktop-keeps-freezing-windows-10/

After some testing; I found a way to mostly stop the disconnection and freezing from the Remote Desktop Client and Server by Disabling UDP and using only TCP.  To do this we are going to add a registry key and modify a group policy setting.  Let's do the registry key entry first.

On your remote desktop client open and type in the following in cmd promt or powershell as administrator

reg add “HKLM\software\policies\microsoft\windows nt\Terminal Services\Client” /v fClientDisableUDP /d 1 /t REG_DWORD

Now group policy.

Run gpedit.msc. then Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative templates > Windows components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Connection client.

Enable the Turn off UDP on client setting.

Now that takes care of the remote desktop client.  On the Remote Desktop server on the machine you are wanting to connect to go to:

Computer Configuration > Administrative templates > Windows components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host.

Select Transport Type -> USE ONLY TCP

Issues connecting to DFS shares from a computer

The issue is an odd one.  A single computer connected to a domain lost it's connection to two DFS file shares.  The file shares are wide open for all domain users with nothing that would cause a restriction connecting to the share.  The share shows up in the user's share list but gives a permissions alert when clicked on and displays as 0 bytes or as nothing at all.

Issue: An active directory connected workstation (laptop) won't connect to DFS file shares.  The two network shares in question have read/write and execute privileges' granted to everyone in the organization.  Out of 8 file shares two of them say that domain users do not have permission to access them; and these are shares where everyone has access.

The shares that they should have access to show a 0KB size and they do not have permissions to access the resource but are clearly a member of the security group to get access to the shared resource.

After trying several of the typical ways to fix the issue such as:

• removing the system from the active directory
• a disk check and file system scan
• logging in as a separate user
• logging into another system with the user where the issue exists.

After several attempts to get it fixed using typical tools; I looked outside the box; the event viewer was not showing anything helpful for troubleshooting so  I disabled offline files to see if I could access the network shares. After doing this it appears I was able to.

Resolution:

The resolution is a little odd I think it was caused by a corrupt DFS Cache which needs to be removed using local computer group policy.  Local computer group policy processing order can be found here.  To summarize the processing order can be seen below.

1. Local
2. Site
3. Domain
4. OU

Removing the computer from the domain and removing the computer from the active directory was not enough to reset the offline DFS Cache.  I had to enable the prevention of the Offline File use to get the issue fixed.

On the local computer

open gpedit.msc

go to local computer policy -> Computer Configuration -> Network -> Offline Files -> Prevent use of Offline Files Folder

Enable Prevent use of Offline Files folder

Remove the computer from the Active directory, and login as a local user.  Remove any unused users form the System Properties -> Advanced -> User Profiles -> Local User Profiles

Once that was done, I tried to connect to the DFS share from the workgroup computer; using domain credentials and the DFS shares started showing correctly.  Then when I reconnected the system to the domain, all users could access all the DFS shares properly.  After verifying that the share showed up properly; I then set the Prevent use of Offline Files folder to "Not Configured".  Then I verified that the network drives still showed properly and were accessible which they were. It was an odd issue which did not affect the user but a specific machine's connection with specific shares regardless of the user logged in.