First, I have been supporting Microsft since Win 3.1 and NT 3.1, I am stating I am one of your longtime engineers and hope you will take my suggestion into consideration.

As an Administrator I access a lot of different areas that users do not. These areas are critical to my day to day oerations and help me keep your products in a good light. Recently, you have removed the control panel and our work arounds get removed with each update. As an engineer I realize that these tools are totally unecessary for the standard user, but critical to me.

What I am asking as a near 30 year supporter\administrator\engineer, is that you consider making a custom GUI install for engineers. One that keeps our tools where we need them at and are used to. Speed and accuracy are very crucial, and when you all move these tools around to make things look pretty and exciting for end users, it makes life horrific for us.

A great example was a few years back when I worked on my first server 2012 I was at a clients office with an emergency and the shutdown restart was hidden in charms. I looked like a complete idiot that I could not figure out how to shutdown or restart the server. I had to pull the power plug, real professional. We lost that client due to that situation.

With these tools there are some fine tuning and updating that also needs to be addressed. A great example is the DHCP panel, everytime I have opened this tool in all my years it never remembers its settings, and although you have a single or AD integrated DHCP server I have to manually pick and connect to it. The I have to strectch all the areas out appropriatly to be able to use the tool. There are other applications that are the same way and it would be nice to have them updated also.

What I am trying to be nice about is I along with many of my era engineers would like for Microsoft to acknowledge our importance and to work with us to be able to provide the best support we can. Evertime you move, take away or change our tools you cripple us, and that cripples your reputation.

Please take a minute to work with us, your life long dedicated engineers that promote and support your many servers OS'/Application and desktops OS's. I have given you almost 30 years, please work with me/us to make our lives easier and our users and mangement far more happy with your products.

Thanks
Matt

In Windows Update on Server 2016 and beyond, there is the Restart options, which allows you to Schedule a time to restart and finish installing updates.

The problem is you can only turn this on once the updates have fully completed installed.

Instead of having to wait for the update to install, you should be allowed to Schedule the Restart time from this menu ONCE YOU HAVE ALREADY BEGUN to install updates. It's very annoying to have to wait for hours or however long, to then later have to go back and schedule the restart. You should be able to set it right away once you begin the install of updates. Perhaps, if the updates fail, then maybe it can be configured to automatically NOT reboot if there's a problem

Test-NetConnection does not ignore any IP that is marked SkipAsSource=True when showing the SourceAddress in the result. It will consider whatever IP is closest to the gateway address to be the source address even if that IP has SkipAsSource=true.

For example, given these IP bindings and a gateway address of 10.10.10.1, the SourceAddress should be 10.10.10.33 because it is the lowest address with SkipAsSource=False

IPAddress SkipAsSource InterfaceIndex InterfaceAlias
--------- ------------ -------------- --------------
10.10.10.11 True 12 Production VLAN 123
10.10.10.22 True 12 Production VLAN 123
10.10.10.33 False 12 Production VLAN 123
10.10.10.44 True 12 Production VLAN 123
10.10.10.55 True 12 Production VLAN 123
10.10.10.66 True 12 Production VLAN 123

However, here are the results.

Test-NetConnection <server> -Port 443

ComputerName : <server>
RemoteAddress : <server>
RemotePort : 443
InterfaceAlias : Ethernet
SourceAddress : 10.10.10.11
PingSucceeded : False
PingReplyDetails (RTT) : 0 ms
TcpTestSucceeded : False

The environment is 2012R2 STD with PowerShell v5