Active Directory Blog

There are a whole host of issues that are simply never seen unless you have a large distributed environment. I know that sounds startling but here’s a hypothetical example. Imagine that you are an online retailer and for every identity that you are transacting Read More...

A lot of planning goes into the features and capabilities of each Windows release. Over the years I’ve noticed that there is not a great deal of awareness out in the general public for just how much work and labor goes into a new version of Windows. We’ll Read More...

Authentication is entering every facet of our lives nowadays. It is common to have multiple passwords: passwords for work, home email, and Internet websites to name a few. It’s easy to have a lot of different passwords, and equally easy to use only one Read More...

I decided that we needed some more detail and to give a walk through scenario on this downgrade attack deal I mentioned a while back in a blog post . As a recap, a customer called in after noticing the events below appearing intermittently but repeatedly-and 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...

There are an ever increasing number of scenarios out there in the business world where two different companies, or company divisions, may be using Active Directory for their directory service but may not be setting up an actual trust between the two. Read More...

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...

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...

A while back I wrote a blog post regarding PAC (Privilege Attribute Certificate) validation in Microsoft Kerberos. We’ve had enough interest in this lately, particularly around the idea of disabling it, that it seemed like a good idea to post about this Read More...

Occasionally I am contacted with specific questions or topics people would like to hear more about. This post is a reply to one of those. Here’s the question: My question is what are the impact when I change the logon workstation property of a user account Read More...

A while back I did a blog post about some problems that were seen with people testing Windows Vista and then “rolling back” to Windows XP and some problems that could be seen when using the same computer object (also known as account) in AD. If you didn’t get a chance to read it here’s the post. What that scenario highlighted was the added level of encryption, by way of leaving behind a little of the supporting infrastructure in the msds-supported-encryptiontypes attribute value. In this post we’re going to talk about the Big Picture of the new authentication encryption available and a few things to keep in mind. 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...

Some readers may scoff a little when I talk about how under appreciated the whole Active Directory scheme is. Not schem a but scheme. I’m talking about the entire client and server interaction and how they work together to provide all of the distributed Read More...

Ah, there’s nothing like the stop-everything, our-company-has-come-to-a-complete-halt emergency call we sometimes get where the domain controllers have slowed to a figurative crawl. Resulting in nearly all other business likewise emulating a glacier as Read More...

A while back I posted about troubleshooting a problem where a customer had seen a home grown application was not working as expected. The app was designed to run in a web site which the user would connect to from Internet Explorer on a client. The HTTP Read More...