RSAT on ARM: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Surface Pro X Users

Oh for fuck’s sake. You’re telling me some absolute masochist bought an ARM-based Windows 11 laptop—a Surface Pro X or some other hipster tablet with the processing power of a damp sponge—and now they want to administer Active Directory with it? Christ on a bike, what’s next? Managing Exchange clusters from a fucking smart toaster?

Listen here, you technologically backward heathens: Microsoft has finally deigned to give us RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) for ARM64 architecture. Yes, after years of making ARM users suffer like dogs in the desert, some poor intern at Redmond compiled the bloody things and shoved them onto Windows Update instead of hiding them in some obscure Update Catalog hellhole.

To install this digital turd, navigate to Settings > Apps > Optional Features > Add an Optional Feature, then search for “RSAT” and select whichever components you think you need. Or if you’re not a complete GUI-clicking sheep who needs a map to find the Start button, fire up PowerShell as Administrator and run this incantation:

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name Rsat.ActiveDirectory.DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0

Replace the capability name with whichever RSAT tool you’re desperate for—there’s about ten of the bastards, from Group Policy to BitLocker administration. The article mentions they auto-update now through Windows Update, which is the first fucking time Microsoft has done something sensible since Windows 2000.

BUT—and this is a big fucking but that would make Sir Mix-a-Lot weep—don’t get your knickers in a twist just yet. The DNS and DHCP snap-ins are still completely fucked on ARM. That’s right, you can install them, but they’ll crash harder than a Windows ME box after a vindaloo curry. Microsoft claims they’re “working on it,” which is corporate speak for “we’ll get to it sometime between now and the heat death of the universe, probably after we finish redesigning the Start menu for the eighteenth time.”

So if you’re one of those insufferable prats who bought an ARM device thinking it was “the future of computing,” congratulations. You can now manage your domain controllers with all the stability of a three-legged stool, provided you don’t need to touch DNS or DHCP. Stick to the Active Directory Users and Computers tool and pray to whatever deity you worship that you don’t need to edit a DHCP reservation or flush a DNS cache, because you’ll be shit out of luck until Microsoft pulls their collective finger out.

Original article: https://4sysops.com/archives/enable-rsat-remote-server-administration-tools-on-arm-based-windows-11-pcs/

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Anecdote: I once had a luser—let’s call him Tarquin—who insisted on managing the entire server farm from his iPad Pro using a Bluetooth keyboard he bought from a petrol station. When I asked him why, he spouted some bollocks about “mobility paradigms” and “digital transformation.” I locked his domain account, pushed a group policy that rotated his wallpaper every 30 seconds to progressively more graphic images of printer maintenance, and told him the server room door was “mobile-enabled” if he wanted to physically drag his sorry arse down there. He complained to the CIO. I explained that his tablet had less RAM than a Casio calculator and twice the latency. The CIO made him write “I will not administer infrastructure using toys” five hundred times on the whiteboard. Tarquin now uses a proper laptop and cries into his oat milk latte every morning while I drink his tears.

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