To start the new year off right I have an article that is a must read if you IT administrator and using Microsoft products.  It’s in the January edition of Windows IT Pro magazine, in their “What Would Microsoft Support Do?” column.  You can...

A while back my colleague Ned Pyle wrote a really great blog post about what to do in your IT career if you want to excel.   You can read it here, and if you read just that today (and take it to heart) you’ve done something good for yourself...

It’s been months since I last did a blog post, so that may have led three or four people to wonder “what happened?”. Since October I’ve been working on a project to add functionality to our customer’s support experience.  Many of you out there have...

If you are like every other IT person I know you are doing a lot of technical support for family and friends over the holiday season. I thought of that last week and decided to write a short blog post detailing one of the least hyped and most useful items...

If you are working in a support or engineering role with Microsoft platform products like the various Windows versions one of the biggest struggles you can have is understanding what to expect in code and on the network when Windows computers communicate...

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...

Eight years ago today people had started their day at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington DC, and on a few planes. Some were commuting to work destinations and others were already at work. These were people that were working...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I wanted to do a quick post on an important security bulletin. It’s Microsoft Security Bulletin MS09-018 – Critical . This security update is to address a vulnerability in Active Directory. I’m pasting the Executive Summary below, but I highly recommend...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

A while back I wrote a blog post about setting up Kerberos constrained delegation. As a bit of an re-introduction, a lot of the value of the Kerberos authentication protocol is that it allows an application or service to impersonate a user in order to...

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...

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...

The five or six people who have read my little bio snippet on Technet read that I like to play video games-specifically Xbox 360 games. I was doing just that the other night-playing Fallout 3-when my wife walked into the study to ask for help with all...