My notes, things I have learned, and documentation I have created.

In Windows 2016, Server Manager starts up at logon. It does this in Windows 2012 R2, but I have not confirmed whether the solution is the same to prevent this behavior. To stop this, you do from the Task Scheduler.

You bring up Task Scheduler under Administrative Tools.

Expand Task Scheduler Library/Microsoft/Windows, and go down to ServerManager.

Under Server Manager, you will see two tasks: CleanupOldPerfLogs and ServerManager.

Right mouse click ServerManager and select Disable. This will turn this behavior off for all users that login to the server.

I have verified that can be modified the same way in Server 2012 R2 as well.

I was given the private key for an SFTP server on a remote network. The key was generate using puttygen.exe or similar program on a Windows system. I needed to using public key authentication to access the server. This is what I did to generate a public key to authenticate.

On a Windows system, I ran puttygen.exe and imported the private key. You can either do this as a parameter to the puttygen.exe program or import the key once you have started puttygen.exe:

puttygen somebodys.ppk

Once the key is imported, you can change the key comment from imported-openssh-key to something more meaningful. And enter and confirm your choice of passphrase.

Then save the public key by clicking the button.

Copy the newly generated public key to the openssh sftp client machine.

Put the file in file in the ~/.ssh directory and secure it (chmod 400 ~.ssh/somebodys.pub).

Then you just have to pass it to your sftp command.

$ sftp -i ~/.ssh/somebody.pub myusername@their.host.name

You can write protect a USB (or any drive for that matter) using DISKPART.

With the drive plugged in open up a command prompt and enter DISKPART.

Then list the disks in your system to determine which one is the USB drive using LIST DISKS

Once identified, enter SELECT DISK #, where # is the number corresponding to your USB disk.

To list disk attributes enter ATTRIBUTES DISK.

To set disk to read only enter ATTRIBUTES DISK SET READONLY.

To remove read only restriction enter ATTRIBUTES DISK CLEAR READONLY.