You may have heard via the grapevine, or even via the Beta program for that matter, that Windows Server 2008 R2 will ship with an Active Directory Module for Powershell. Having seen some of the capabilities at the recent MVP Summit, I am very impressed with the work the product team has done in… Read More: Active directory Powershell Blog »
I’m finding there is a huge gulf between playing with Windows Server 2008 in a lab and working with it in a production environment. The biggest difference for me is that I typically use a built-in Administrator account in the lab environment, but work with an account with delegated permissions in production. This means I… Read More: Windows Server 2008 User Account Control Gotcha #4 »
Okay, okay, I realise that I may be labouring the point somewhat. I’ve already written two blog entries (here and here) about UAC in Windows Server 2008 and this is the third and (probably) last. When you check DC replication using the repadmin /showreps command from a privileged command window you might see something like… Read More: Windows Server 2008 User Account Control Gotcha #3 »
Yesterday I blogged about some of the confusion that Windows Server 2008 User Account Control can cause. Continuing on the same theme, here is another example – this time using slmgr.vbs to query the licence activation status of a Windows Server 2008 machine. This is what you see when you run the command line from… Read More: Windows Server 2008 User Account Control Gotcha #2 »
I’ve been working with both Vista and Windows Server 2008 for quite a while now, but I still manage to fall foul of User Account Control, especially when working from the command prompt. As you will no doubt be aware, there are certain tasks that need elevated privileges and these require you to open the… Read More: Windows Server 2008 User Account Control Gotcha #1 »
Most people are (quite rightly) terrified of seeing a whole bunch of errors in the DS event log following a schema update. This happened to me in a lab environment at a customer recently and I thought I would share the information here. I ran Windows Server 2008 adprep /forestprep on a Windows Server 2003… Read More: Error Events 1136 Following Windows Server 2008 Forestprep »
It’s been a while, but Joe Richards has released a new version of his most excellent (and free!) command line tool, ADFIND. This latest version is V01.39.00 and incorporates a number of new features, switches and shortcuts. Check it out here.
The other day I had a need to configure scheduled backups of GPOs to file on a Windows Server 2008 Domain Controller. Aha (I thought), I’ve done this before using the BackupAllGPOs.wsf script that is included along with a whole bunch of other handy scripts when you install the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). … Read More: PowerShell GPMC scripts »
Or at least it nearly did. I was working a script and because of a small typo very nearly lost most of the data on my C: drive. It’s very easy to get wrong, so treat this as a cautionary tale. The example below shows the error I made and the potential impact. I’ve used… Read More: PowerShell ate my C: Drive »
Windows Server 2008 (and Vista) offer improved options for event log management. For example, you now have the option to forward events to a central event collector server. You also now have powerful filtering capabilities. One of the features I like is the Wevtutil command-line tool that allows you to retrieve, query, archive, export and… Read More: Exporting Events with Wevtutil Using a Time-Based Query »