The other day I had a need to run a demo for a customer that involved showing backup and recovery of AD LDS using Windows Server Backup. I decided to re-use an existing virtual machine and wanted to start afresh by clearing all existing backups. Simple enough, I thought, and proceeded to re-format the dedicated… Read More »
The other day I was in an environment where I had to find what Certification Authorities (CAs) were in place. With nobody immediately available to help me out, I stumbled around for bit before I worked out how to find them. Method 1. Query the membership of the Cert Publishers group. Cert Publishers is a… Read More »
I have recently spent some time working with Xpath queries as part of Event Log filtering in Windows Server 2008. It’s a great feature, but one limitation I found was that it doesn’t appear possible to use the starts-with() function when querying Event Logs with either the UI or Wevtutil.exe. Here’s an example. Let’s say… Read More »
Laura Hunter and Brian Desmond will be doing a webcast discussing and demoing the new Active Directory features in Windows Server 2008 R2 as well as answering AD questions. They have a 90 minute slot and expect to spend ~45-60 minutes on R2 and the remainder taking questions on the presentation and AD in general. They’d love to see you… Read More »
In my last post, I provided a small batch file to support scheduled IFM dumps of an AD LDS instance. Afterwards, I realised that batch files are sooo last century and decided to have a crack at the Powershell version. I’m no Bwandon, but the script below seems to do the trick. # # Name: Create_IFM_Dump.ps1 #… Read More »
Microsoft Technet describes how to back up an AD LDS instance using either Windows Server Backup or Dsdbutil.exe. Interestingly, the Dsdbutil method leverages the Install From Media (IFM) feature to perform the backup. Here’s a small batch file that you can use to schedule the backup using the Task Scheduler. @echo off rd /s c:\backup\adlds\Instance1\ /q %windir%\system32\dsdbutil.exe… Read More »
If you’ve spent some time with Vista or Windows Server 2008 you’ll have noticed that there are some fundamental changes to the event viewer. One of the changes is in the way in which event logs can be filtered. In addition to the point-and-click filter selection you can now also enter an xpath query by… Read More »
I really like the snapshot feature of Windows Server 2008 AD and have been using it quite a bit recently. This week I had my first foray into snapshotting with AD LDS. Everything is pretty much the same as for AD, the only obvious difference being that you can create the snapshots using either dsdbutil… Read More »
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 »
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 »