Back in February 2012, I was lucky enough to take part in the Windows 2008 R2 Directory Services Masters class and I promised that I would blog about my experience. Consequently, this will probably turn into another series as I wouldn’t do it any...

Three months ago I posted some information on AD Sites, Subnets and Roaming Clients . The heart of the blog was a PowerShell script that collected and collated netlogon.log files across all Domain Controllers in the forest to report a list of hostnames...

Hello, Ray Zabilla and Rick Bergman again. As promised in our previous post on this topic we will go into the details of how we created the script, the challenges we had during testing and what final code looks like. We are even so generous that we are...

If the title of this blog hasn’t already put you off, you’re probably interested in the interaction between Microsoft DNS and DHCP services . Specifically, you should understand how Microsoft DHCP servers can be configured to dynamically register...

Sometimes, we Microsoft engineers get called into a 'forensics' type situation to help a customer try to answer the "W" questions - where someone (WHO?) did something (WHAT?) at some point (WHEN?) in Active Directory (AD) or some other aspect of a Windows...

Hello! Jake Mowrer here to share an “experience” with you all that will hopefully help you avoid running into a nightmare the next time you add a DFS Namespace (DFS-N) server. I find that DFS-N in customer environments works well, so well...

Hello Greg Jaworski here again to briefly talk about two issues when raising the domain functional level (and/or) the forest functional level to Windows Server 2008 R2. While we have loads of documentation on this and numerous blogs there are a few issues...

Disclaimer: For brevity and to get some key points across, quite a bit of detail about Kerberos has been purposely ommitted from this blog entry. I'm certain that those that are experiencing any of the problems below won't mind :) As a Premier Field...

Alot more goes into a "well managed" base OS build design beyond booting from the OS media and then "Next > Next > Finish." The content of this post is the outcome of many fruitful whiteboard sessions around Windows base-OS builds. Some of this...

As PFEs, one of our major roles and responsibilities is to relay best practices and “ lessons from the field .” In this post, I’ll present a method – not the only method – of how to progress through a Hyper-V infrastructure...

We’ve recently received some great feedback from several customers and other PFEs on the ADM template post that Mark and I wrote a month or two back. I thought I’d take some time to respond to some of those questions and to post an updated...

Hi, my name is Doug Gabbard and also a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) with Microsoft for about the past 8 years.  I hope to add to the Ask PFE Platform blog with the others already here.  I get the opportunity to see challenges our customers face...

Hello our names are Ray Zabilla and Rick Bergman. Ray and I are Dedicated Premier Field Engineers with Microsoft and work with the same customer. We were both away from our customer during the same week attending training, when we had an issue pop up...

There I was, the computer clock showed 1AM, I was trying to figure out how to fulfill what seemed to be a simple customer request. “How do I get a daily report from 12AM to 11:59PM every day on how my server is performing?” Now you may...

I recently ran across an unexpected issue regarding LCS 2005, OCS 2007, LYNC 2010 and AD 2008 R2 schema updates. Unfortunately for my client we discovered the issue too late, but hopefully this article will provide you with the necessary understanding...

Have you ever tried to restore a server? What about a Production server? How about in the middle of the night? It never goes smoothly. Your cellphone never stops ringing. Often, the only thing that gets the server recovered is your own ingenuity and rock...

After Greg gave you some great tips about how to join Microsoft, and Mark explained what it's like being a PFE , it's time to join us! If you are interested (and I bet you are), Microsoft Services is hiring in Charlotte. We will have an Open House...

Introduction With the introduction of Windows 2003 and the new DNS application partitions, I have helped numerous customers resolve the issue of having multiple copies of the same DNS zone. So, today we're going to cover the following: 1.) What...

Hi, Mark Morowczynski here again, in a previous post, http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2012/01/16/how-to-become-a-premier-field-engineer-pfe.aspx Greg Jaworski, a fellow transactional PFE, touched on how to become a PFE and defined what a...

In my role, I often get to review failover clusters. Typically we look for configuration problems or deviations from best practices. One of the most challenging aspects of managing and maintaining a failover cluster is keeping the nodes identically configured...

Hello my name is Greg Jaworski. I am a Transactional Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft. A very common question is what it takes to join Microsoft. What kind of skills should I have? How many years of experience do I need? A comment from one of our...

There are many potential causes for Cluster communication failures including: Network latency Network outages Faulty drivers or network cards, including TCP offload issues Misconfigured firewall rules Security software such as anti-virus...

Troubleshooting Series New Year greetings and salutations from Hilde and the rest of the PFEs out there! This is the first posting to this blog in 2012 and the second post in a multi-part series on troubleshooting. In this installment, I’ll...

If you want detailed information on how Active Directory sites and subnets work to help clients find their closest domain controller, there is good information on TechNet . In short, you need to ensure that you’ve defined (in Active Directory Sites...

Hello, my name is Mike Hildebrand (aka 'Hilde') - I'm a Dedicated Premier Field Engineer with Microsoft. Welcome to the first in a multi-part series from us on troubleshooting. From mindsets to toolsets, a variety of Microsoft Premier Field Engineers...