Active Directory Blog

In this blog post we’re going to go over a few techniques that are a bit old school but will come in handy for understanding how things work even if you ultimately use a great monitoring suite like MOM. Now, there are great articles here and here that Read More...

This week I’ve had the need to do some testing around ADAM (also known by it’s shiny new name of Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services or AD LDS).  The tests themselves are not directly relevant to this blog post, but in order for the tests Read More...

I was well and truly stumped a few months ago. I joke that once a year I am flat out wrong, and rarely do I have nothing to say on a subject. The 'once a year I may be flat out wrong' statement may be true simply because after 15 years in the IT industry Read More...

When we do initial interviewing of a candidate for a job here in the CSS Directory Services team a question we’ll often start with is “how important is DNS to Active Directory?”. The person’s answer-if the correct answer of very important is given- is Read More...

I want to point out an excellent resource for an administrator out there who is responsible for Active Directory replication in their environment. The resource is a comprehensive and detailed article solely on using Repadmin.exe. The article goes over Read More...

I was recently asked to help out on an issue with a similar theme to other cases we have seen over the years. The topic has never been one that has generated a high number of calls to us but the calls we have received are not easy ones to get an initial Read More...

There’s normal troubleshooting and then there’s the stuff you do when the basic troubleshooting doesn’t get things resolved. Normal troubleshooting can be things like selecting “last known good” on a reboot after installing a new driver and having a blue screen. Or perhaps uninstalling and then reinstalling an application, or altering settings for the application or operating system to alleviate a problem. Sometimes we have to dig in and find out more. Many admins out there in the world live that every day. Which is why we add methods to find out more into our products. This post is all about listing all of the data gathering methods that a Directory Services person may ever need to know. Since there are so many it will be difficult to organize well in one uber post but I’m going to put out here for you all anyway, disorganized or not. Read More...