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, 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...

Note:  This is general best practice guidance for implementing schema extensions, not the testing of their functionality.  There may be some additional best practices around design and functionality of schema extensions that should be considered...

Login scripts once implemented in an environment tend to never really get removed. They are always there, running. The fact that many of these login script functionality, such as mapping drives, could be moved to Group Policy Preferences ( http://blogs...

I was recently on site with a customer performing an ADRAP when we found that several domain controllers were missing certain generic SRV records from DNS. The environment had around one-hundred DCs and thirty of them were missing records. Unsure why...

In my role as a transactional PFE, I have the privilege of visiting 40-50 customers per year. Often I’m called in to perform an Assessment of the Active Directory Infrastructure . Without a doubt, one of the biggest challenges most customers face...

Thanks for great feedback and for reading my prior AskPFEPlat post regarding Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 . Based on feedback and questions following that post, it seemed like a great time to show how to import a storage pool on another server...

One common and potentially time consuming administrative task I hear my customers discuss is maintenance of SSL certificates on large Web farms (initial set up, renewals, etc.). These Web farms can be for Outlook Web Access, Ecommerce, intranet pages...

Fellow PFE and blogger Michael “Hilde” Hildebrand makes a great case for being able to inventory the IP configuration of your hosts – especially those that have static IP configurations (like most of your servers). For example, audit...

Hey y’all, Mark here again with an interesting “Real World” XPerf trace from the depths of a WDRAP (Windows Desktop Risk Assessment). If your infrastructure hasn’t had a WDRAP yet, or it’s been a while, work with your Technical...

Customers ask from time to time: “What is a File Share Witness (FSW)?” Sometimes they’ve worked with prior versions of clustering and don’t know what a FSW is, or that the option exists. The next question asked is usually: “When...

Recently I was asked by one of my customers to assist in a project to replace TMG with UAG, specifically for their Remote Desktop RemoteApp publishing portal. I’m not an expert with UAG, but I can usually get it to do what I need it to do, and I have...

In case you haven't heard, we're hard at work on the next release of Windows Windows Server 2012 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/windowsserver/hh534429.aspx Windows 8 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/hh771457.aspx?ITPID=mscomsc...

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, 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...

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...

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...

Hey everyone, I’d like to make you aware of an opportunity to connect with some AskPFEPlat celebrities (relatively speaking, of course). We’re hosting two, one-day workshops, live and in-person. This is a unique opportunity for you to participate in detailed...

Hey y’all, Mark here with some quick links for you. We have two other PFE team blogs that have been getting some steam as of late we thought we’d pass along so our fine readership can check them out and spread the word. A bunch of SQL folks...

I frequently get asked to consult on building out new Public Key Infrastructures here in Premier Field Engineering. One of the things that I get asked commonly is “How do I choose a key length and Hash Algorithm?”. That’s a complex question, that generally...

My name is Bryan Zink and I am a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer focused on supporting Windows Server and Active Directory. You’ve probably read the fantastic post by Yong Rhee introducing RAP as a Service . Maybe you even read What is RaaS? Is That...

Greg here with a quick post where the new DNS PowerShell cmdlets in AD made a task much easier. Many of our customers use Microsoft DNS and a feature of Microsoft DNS is the ability to remove stale records. By default this feature is disabled and...

Dougga here to answer a couple of quick RODC related questions.  I have been the fortunate PFE to perform ADRAPs (Active Directory Risk Assessment Program) that have had more than the average number of RODCs . I have also reviewed environments with...

Here’s an interesting question that came to us from one of our readers. If you have a question for us, don't forget that you can contact us using the Contact tile just to the right of this article when viewed from our TechNet blog . Question...

Not sure where February went but it sure is flying by in a hurry. During the month I had another interesting question given to me to answer. Don't forget that you can contact us using the Contact tile just to the right of this article when viewed from...