The past year and a half have been active for us in support in terms of dealing with MaxConcurrentApi issues. We’ve created a great deal of new documentation , updated existing documentation , successfully advocated some changes in product to help reduce...

Howdy folks! I've posted another PowerShell script which may come in handy for IT admins no matter what services you administer. You can read more about it below, and you can download it from this TechNet Script Center link . Public Key Infrastructure...

Hi folks! I’ve posted a handy little script up to the TechNet Script Center. Here’s a direct link Technorati Tags: WAAD , Windows Azure AD , O365 , Office 365 , PowerShell This script is used to quickly retrieve all of the basic details about your Office...

Hi folks! I’m due for my (now) semi annual blog post, and I have a pretty good one. Short and sweet. Remember my blog posts about MaxConcurrentApi problems? Well, of course not but they are here and here so you can read them now. I’m...

Hi folks! If you have to set up or administer any Kerberos authentication in your environment then I have an article that is a must read for you. It's in the May editiion of Windows IT Pro magazine, in their "What Would Microsoft Support Do?" column....

A watershed is where things come together into a single point.  Think of a collection of streams coming down off mountains, coming together at a single body of water, like a river. Bill Laing is Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of the Shared...

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...