I am very happy to announce that the Certificate Web Enrollment pages from Server 2008 are available as a free download at last. Just click on the links below to get the pages, then follow the steps in the KB article to install them on your Server 2003...

Have you ever heard the Shakespeare paraphrased saying “a rose by any other name is still a rose?”. Well, the same holds true for objects in AD. Not that we have “rose” class objects, but the point being that simply renaming an object doesn’t really fundamentally...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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! 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...

In order to make sure everyone is prepared if they need to be I wanted to post a reminder about Daylight Saving Time (DST). DST in the United States will be March 9 th 2008 at 2:00 AM. Last year the United States Congress changed DST observance...

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...

We end up taking indexing for granted most of the time until and unless we encounter a problem. Why don’t we start off with the question of “what is indexing?”. So an index is essentially a way of organizing data for fast retrieval or at least retrieving...

For Customer Services and Support division employees at Microsoft it’s inevitable that, if you talk directly to customers at all, you will be asked whether you are certified. I’ve even heard our customers ask development folks (aka programmers) that question...

There’s be a lot of demand for the web enrollment pages from Server 2008. For those that have contacted me directly I apologize for the trouble I’ve had getting back to everyone on these. I also know that it some people expressed frustration over having...

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....

This has come up several times, and I suspect will continue to do so occasionally. So I thought I’d post about this real quick in order to get the word out and also make sure that I don’t give the wrong answer on this to someone again (I forgot, gave...

Happy New Years everyone! Let’s start the year off with a less strenuous article regarding how the domain logon list gets populated. I’m talking about the user logon dialogue which you see following pressing control, alt and delete at the same time. There...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...