Opening links with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome

I recently had a request to setup certain website links to open with a specific browser. In this case, it was with both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. For most people, creating links is as simple as right clicking the location where you want your link, then selecting New > Shortcut. Depending on what your default browser is, the link will be opened by that browser. In many corporate environments, however, Internet Explorer is still the default browser. In these cases, as long as you have a modern browser installed, you can create a shortcut to have a link open with a specific browser.

Google Chrome

In the case of Chrome, you will have to create a shortcut that points to the executable, followed by a URL switch and finally the URL you want the browser to open. It will look something like this:

       "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" -url https://www.google.com
 

This path code assumes that Google Chrome is installed in its default location, otherwise adjust that to reflect your installation location.

Microsoft Edge

In a system that has Edge installed, then the path code just needs the Edge URI followed by the URL. It will look something like this:

       microsoft-edge:https://www.google.com
 

As you can see, the solution is a simpler one, as you do not have to worry about installation location. This is a system wide setting and you just have to add the URI as a prefix, followed by the address you want to point to.

The above screenshot shows an example of what a MS link configuration would look like.

Displaying serial number and model of Pure Storage array

The command listed below will display the model, serial number and part number of controller 0. You can substitute CT0 for CT1 to get the information on controller 1. 

       
       purehw list CT0 --spec
 

Server 2019 - Windows 10 Start Menu & Display Settings Not Working *FIXED*

Recently I was setting up a new Microsoft Windows 2019 Server image and as part of our onboarding process, we are required to patch and secure any new system. Seeing how Server 2019 is a new O/S in our environment, we didn't have any automation script to take care of all this. Part of the onboarding consists in either disabling services that are not needed or providing a justification for our baselines. As we were tackling this step, a user reported that the Start Menu wasn't working. I checked, under my profile I did not experience this issue. Another user who had logged in also did not have the same problem. 

I went ahead and started looking up and remembered that we had a similar issue with Windows 10, the fix was making sure a couple of services were running and then running the following command in Power Shell:

       
       Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
 

Unfortunately that did not resolve the issue for the user. It wasn't until I tested another server that I started experiencing the issue. The above fix did not work for our Server 2019 image. At this point I decided to get Microsoft involved. We tried different variations of the above fix, a lot of permissions and other things but one thing we noticed that was that the ShellExperienceHost service was not running under affected accounts. No rhyme or reason. We tried local users, other domain users and the issue was there with any new user. Some of the errors that were being logged were ID 69 with source AppModel-Runtime.

The errors would generate any time you left clicked the Start Menu or you attempted to launch Display Settings and they would mention ShellExperienceHost, Cortana or another app.

Below is an example of the error you would receive whenever you would try to launch the Display Settings.

After a lot of back and forth with Microsoft and doing my own testing, it turns out that I disabled a critical service that was the culprit for all these issues. Microsoft tech support did not have this documented anywhere according to the tech whom I worked with, thus me posting this in case someone else runs into a similar issue. The service in question is the Capability Access Manager Service (camsvc). The description for the service states that it handles Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application access and capability. Whatever the case, I'm glad this was resolved after all the troubleshooting we ended up doing. 

tl;dr - do not disable the camsvc (Capability Access Manager) service as it will break your start menu and other Windows 10/Server 2019 features.