Blog: Windows Server 2016

One of our customers is hosting their servers with a hosting provider who also provides some other servers, like backups and patching. The hosting provider was unable to patch some of the servers for this customer. After investigating with the hosting provider, it was determined that they could patch all of the servers except for the domain controllers. The service account they were using was a Domain Admin so it should have been able to patch any server. I logged into another server as the service account and tried to access the admin$ share on one of the domain controllers, but was unable to do so.

After some investigation, I found that the Domain Admins group was not a member of the built-in Administrators group in Active Directory. The customer had removed the groups from the Administrators group and had manually put accounts in that group when necessary. This caused the service account the hosting provider was using to work on all of the member servers because Domain Admins had administrative rights to those servers, but they were unable to access the domain controllers because the service account was not an administrator on the domain controllers since it was not a member of the Administrators group. I am not sure why the customer removed the default groups from the Administrators group, so I just added the service account to the built-in Administrators group. The hosting provider attempted to patch the servers again and verified it was working properly.


 

I was working on a Windows Server 2016 system that I had already configured and put in production.  While I was monitoring the resources of the server when I noticed the processes for Windows Defender show up in the task manager as if it were scanning files.  This server already had a different AV solution installed.
 
As it turns out, you need to uninstall Windows Defender feature manually on Windows Server 2016 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-protection/windows-defender-antivirus/windows-defender-antivirus-compatibility​).  Windows Server 2016 will not disable Windows Defender automatically.
 
"On Windows Server 2016, Windows Defender AV will not enter passive or disabled mode if you have also installed a third-party antivirus product. If you install a third-party antivirus product, you should uninstall Windows Defender AV on Windows Server 2016 to prevent problems caused by having multiple antivirus products installed on a machine."