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These are the Updates You Are Looking For

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...
Posted Wednesday, September 23, 2009 2:59 PM by Tim Springston | 0 Comments

Bulking Up an ADAM Test Instance

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...
Posted Friday, August 14, 2009 11:40 AM by Tim Springston | 0 Comments

Testing a Credential Provider

Weeks ago I blogged about how single sign on and credential providers work and a scenario you can run into with them. One reader faced a slightly different scenario but was able to apply that topic toward getting his issue resolved. He had installed a Read More...
Posted Friday, July 10, 2009 4:43 PM by Tim Springston | 0 Comments

Referral Chasing

It’s easy to forget that when we say “Directory Services” we are really talking about multiple technologies. I remember when the idea that what we support is so much more than simply a user account repository first hit me. It happened when I first read Read More...
Posted Monday, July 06, 2009 11:14 AM by Tim Springston | 0 Comments

Thoughts on Single Sign On and Credential Providers

We use the term single sign on (SSO) to describe a variety of behaviors in Windows and other applications where the result is simply to prevent the user from being prompted to provide their credentials again and again; to ideally enter their credentials Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 26, 2009 11:35 AM by Tim Springston | 0 Comments

Taking Out The Trash

There will be times when you have to make big changes in your Active Directory. Sometimes those big changes mean deleting a lot of objects. I’ve personally needed to match customer environments by creating tens of thousands of AD objects just to have Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 24, 2009 10:38 AM by Tim Springston | 1 Comments

VSS Snapshots and You

I find myself doing blog posts on things that are not frequent enough for most experienced admins to be aware of since it wouldn’t come across their desk often. The reason for that is that in my role I receive the least common unresolved issues Read More...
Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 8:01 AM by Tim Springston | 0 Comments

Gauging Size Differences in AD Databases

We occasionally receive support calls which revolve around the topics of “why is the Active Directory database on DC A different in size than that on DC B?”. It’s easy to dismiss the question out of hand but there are real life scenarios where this can Read More...
Posted Monday, February 16, 2009 7:45 AM by Tim Springston | 1 Comments

Tabula Rasa

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...
Posted Wednesday, January 14, 2009 8:15 AM by Tim Springston | 0 Comments

Scary Sounding Errors

We have a temporary role in CSS where support folks will help out in supporting prerelease (also known as beta) software.   I’ve worked a couple of Windows betas, and it’s a great experience.   I mention this since I remember a few Read More...
Posted Friday, December 12, 2008 9:44 AM by Tim Springston | 1 Comments

Name Hijacked, Bystander DC Hangs

I learn more about AD and other things every day, which is part of the fun of this job we do-learning about how things work. This story does a good job of lending some understanding to something that can be tough to understand-trust secure channels. This Read More...
Posted Monday, November 24, 2008 8:00 AM by Tim Springston | 1 Comments

Troubleshooting a Memory Leak in Lsass.exe

Although we have a team of engineers who are dedicated to troubleshooting general server performance related problems Microsoft Directory Services specialists are expected to be the “go to” people for Active Directory and domain controller related performance Read More...
Posted Monday, October 13, 2008 8:00 AM by Tim Springston | 1 Comments

NTLM and MaxConcurrentApi Concerns

Although not one of our highest volume issues we get our customers calling about there is one complex scenario that seems to me would be a winner if we handed out prizes to problems that took longest to resolve. That scenario is NTLM client to server Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 2:17 PM by Tim Springston | 2 Comments

DNS Scavenging and AD

Recently I wrote a post about how, in an uncommon scenario, Active Directory integrated DNS could lose an entry regarding a domain controller in a global SRV record. Here’s another aspect of AD integrated DNS which you can run into, particularly if you Read More...
Posted Monday, August 25, 2008 9:00 AM by Tim Springston | 2 Comments

A Complicated Scenario Regarding DNS and the DC Locator SRVs

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...
Posted Friday, August 08, 2008 9:00 AM by Tim Springston | 1 Comments
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