Windows storage hierarchy explained

Quick cheat sheet:

  1. Physical disk, represented by Win32_DiskDrive and MSFT_Disk WMI classes. This is hardware presented to your computer. It is HDD, SSD, FC LUN or iSCSI LUN.
  2. Partition, represented by Win32_DiskPartition and MSFT_Partition WMI classes. Partitions are walls that transforming your physical space into rooms, which later can be used to store your data. Physical disk can have 0 or more partitions.
  3. Volume, represented by Win32_Volume and MSFT_Volume WMI classes. Volumes are named spaces, from abstract rooms you get living room, kitchen and bedrooms. You format room to make it “named room”. Or in other words, you format partition to some file system, i.e. NTFS, FAT or ReFS. Volumes can store data and provide access to it. One partition can have 0 or 1 volume. When partition has 0 volume, in most cases this means that there is no data accessible by user.

Read More

Limit group policy only to client OS

Sometimes you want to apply your policy to every client PC in many OUs. To do such you can use WMI filter. This is especially useful in messy AD structures, where is no dedicated OU for client computer objects.

Namespace: root\CIMv2
Query: select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where ProductType="1"

Read More

TMG 2010 and “RPC Server unavailable”

Recently I have encountered strange TMG behavior. I have permitted all RPC connections to Domain Controllers with system rule and disabled RPC Filter plus switched off “Enable strict RPC compliance” option. But my WMI requests and any other RPC traffic from TMG servers to internal resources was still blocked.

Read More