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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
If you’ve played around with Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services, you will probably be familiar with the snapshot feature within NTDSUTIL. The feature allows you to take snapshot of the volumes that host the AD components and to then mount the snapshot. Once mounted, you can use DSAMAIN.EXE to expose a read-only copy… Read More »
Last week I initiated a discussion on the ActiveDir.org mailing list about running Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers on Server Core. I was curious to see whether there were any good reasons why all DCs (RODCs and RWDCs) should not be run on Server Core as a best practice. The conclusion reached was that,… Read More »
Next to ADFIND.EXE, LDP is the tool I probably use most often when working with Active Directory. It’s an LDAP client that was originally developed for use purely within Microsoft. It can be used for browsing, searching and making changes via the LDAP protocol. Because of its usefulness, Microsoft included LDP in the Support… Read More »
It’s been a little while since I’ve blogged, so here’s a more or less random collection of snippets for you to enjoy/delete at leisure. Quest acquires Netpro Wow, this one took me by surprise, especially as I have been contracting to Quest on and off for the past 10 months. Two of the biggest… Read More »
When running through final preparations for a presentation to a few hundred people (well, tens of people…ok, at least 5 people…proabably) the last thing you need is for your Hyper-v environment to start misbehaving. This is exactly what happened to me and I’ve just found the cause, so am feeling a lot more relaxed about things. I… Read More »