Some time ago I blogged about the Acctinfo2.dll tool and how unfortunate it was that a 64-bit version was not available. Well, the good news is that you can now download a 64-bit version from here: Acctinfo2_64bit.zip I have tested the DLL on both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and it seems… Read More »
If you’re creating contact objects in Active Directory the Exchange cmdlets New-MailContact, Set-MailContact and Set-Contact are usually sufficient. On the other hand I haven’t found a way using these cmdlets to set all the attributes that I might need. For example, the “description” attribute doesn’t appear to feature anywhere. Things have obviously changed with the… Read More »
The other day I applied Update Rollup 1 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 in my test lab and wanted to check that the update was successfully applied. Being something of a Powershell fan I first tried the command shown below: (get-exchangeserver MyE2K7Server).admindisplayversion The output showed Version 8.2 (Build 176.2), which is the same… Read More »
Windows Server 2008 R2 introduces the ability to revert to an earlier forest or domain functional level. Previous versions of Active Directory did not have this ability and raising the forest or domain function level was, effectively, a one-way operation. I say “effectively” because it is possible to revert, but only through highly disruptive recovery… Read More »
I went to install the AD Management Gateway Service (KB968934) on a Domain Controller running Windows Server 2008 SP2 and I received the error shown below. Installer encountered an error: 0x80070422. The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has not enabled devices associated with it. The problem was that… Read More »
There seems to be a certain amount of confusion surrounding Domain and Forest functional levels. Microsoft’s own documentation doesn’t always incorporate the latest version information. KB322692 is a case in point. I also often hear the words “Native” and “Mixed” in relation to functional levels involving Windows Server 2003 or 2008, when in fact these terms… Read More »
Earlier this week Nathan Mercer (Technology Advisor for Microsoft) gave me a brief look at the new Powershell Integrated Scripting Environment available with Windows Server 2008 R2. ISE allows you to run commands and write, test, and debug scripts in a Windows GUI. It also has multi-line editing, tab completion, syntax coloring, selective execution and context-sensitive help. The best thing… Read More »
Wow, looking at the site I see that I haven’t been blogging for the past two months. I have a good excuse – I was away for 5 weeks on holiday in Europe. And since then I’ve been catching up with various things and trying to get prepared for a couple of speaking gigs. First… Read More »
Here’s a quick tip on how to find out what ports your AD LDS instances are listening on. On the machine running the instance(s), open a command prompt with Administrator privileges and type the following: dsdbutil “li i” q The syntax used above runs the dsdbutil.exe utility with the “List Instances” option. The output… Read More »
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 »