We get a lot of “huh?” type questions…things that seem so obvious and straightforward that the instant instinctive thought is “well, yeah, of course that won’t work…” Case in point. One of my colleagues received a call where a customer was...

Some of the fun we in product support have is that, once a new product is released nowadays, we get to chart the unexplored waters of new security settings interoperating with our customers real world environments. With Windows XP and Server 2003...

A few times of the past we’ve received calls from customers where they had some really interesting concerns with using smartcards for domain authentication. There’s some base knowledge to be had with respect to Kerberos. Just a quick mention-yes...

Understanding how things work is as much of a tool as anything included in the Adminpack or Support Tools. If you know how things work, you know what to expect in normal behavior, and what questions to ask when the behavior your seeing is abnormal. ...

Some of my colleagues recently had a real puzzler of an issue. When they are that good I want to share it out with everyone so that they don’t have to take the time themselves. The symptoms were when attempting to connect via terminal services from...

One of the cool things about this job is the way we get to trail blaze new issues as they happen and before any solution or workaround is in sight. We’re the pioneers in a way. This is one example. We’ve had a few customer’s recently mention that...

In my soliloquy of AD logon you heard some broad generalities intended to give a general understanding of the intended design and how it all fits together. In this post I hope to give you a more detailed idea of how it works. How to enable user...

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...

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...

I had some really good questions after the previous post and so I wanted to post the replies so all could see. Also, stay tuned for next week's post on the usage of /SHOWREPL before we move on to other topics. Thanks to Matheeshta and IanCurtis...

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...

We have internal discussion lists in Microsoft that act as clearinghouses for technical issues or hot topics. One of the first thing a fledgling or newly assimilated Microsoftie must do is decide what discussion lists to join for their role. I am...

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...

We have a lot of folks out there who use client side caching as a way to have consistent copies of the work they do as they travel and are not always well-connected to their corporate networks. If you redirect a folder like My Documents, such as...

Something that is becoming more prevalent over the past few years has been great investments into our security technologies for application oriented reasons. Impersonation, people, that’s what I’m talking about. If anyone ever asks you what the big deal...

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...

Hello, all. This is the first post in what I hope will be a useful blog for the Windows admin community. In particular, the AD (or directory services in general) admins out there. I work at one of Microsoft's Global Technical Support Centers providing...

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...

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...

A while back I got involved in an issue where a company had written an application for their own internal use. This application was intended to connect to a web page served out by IIS and then proceed with some other action. They wisely chose to make...

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...

Not another post about Kerberos! Sorry folks, my Momma said ‘stick with what you’re good with’. And since playing Halo 3 is not a paying job I’m doing another blog post on Kerberos. I thought this would be a good one to post since how this works...

I’ve had several blog posts about the improved security in Windows Vista and Server 2008, particularly around cryptography. Here’s one more, albeit a short one. This post is about how, generally, Encrypted File System (EFS) works using Advanced...

Recently I posted saying that I’d give a preview of Longhorn Server Active Directory. Well, here it is. I will caution all who read this to take into account that we are still in a beta production phase, so some or all of these items could change (or...

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...