Doing some digging with a teammate today it was incredibly difficult to find information on how to automate the settings change of the Sessions tab on a user object. Different paths indicate we need to edit the userParameters attribute but you've probably...

For me the issue was happening with Powershell and Get-Winevent, but it could happen with any number of actions. In my instance the problem occurs when we were using a cross-forest single sign-on account to manage multiple Active Directory forests. In...

I found that there were a few solutions out there on the internet but still didn’t really get me what I was after.  I wanted to find out my total SID count that could be created, and then find the current rid pool high water mark so I could track...

Was looking at an issue today where a whole bunch of our servers were showing clock speeds that didn’t match the max clock speed.  These servers were showing up on our exBPA reports and thus landed in my lap to investigate.  At first I assumed...

Thought I’d doc this for any others who run into this issue.  I had to demote/promote a machine this morning and when it finished promoting I found it was missing all the NTDS\* counters in perfmon.  I ran LODCTR /Q and saw that it looked wrong...

Background: In an earlier post I talked about some new features for Windows 2008 and Vista.  One of those new features that is often overlooked are the data collector sets (DCS).  One particular role that leverages data collector sets is active...

Been using this internally for the last couple of weeks and have been digging the changes.  Just wanted to put this out here to spread the word.   http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2008/12/23/early-christmas-present-from-powershell-team...

This is more of a proof of concept, but I've used it with success internally. Take it and do with it what you want. Many thx to Brandon who did the "heavy lifting" when I got stuck! Overview: Ever run into cluster issues and wanted to see if the...

Man it was hard to find info on using set-acl on a registry key!   I was looking for a way to set an ACL that once set would be inherited by child keys and values.    We needed to give “Local Service” full control on the registry...

Over the past few months I have fallen in love with PowerShell.   I’ve taken on a new role (starting in mid-October) that will be more focused on automating out administrative tasks via powershell so the focus of this blog might change more...

First, I found the details here . Second, things can change as this is being done with the CTP for Powershell 2.0 Third, if you don’t know about remoting in 2.0 watch this 5 minute video . Then read this . Whew. Backstory: ...

This works for Windows 2003 and Windows 2008. We use it during our reliability study to let the server owners know that they shouldn't reboot their boxes without a good reason. You can use it for whatever you’d like. :) The two keys to set: reg...

Ran into a weird issue where I was getting access denied when trying to query nodes remotely in powershell.  The query was working fine against Windows 2003 cluster names and worked locally when ran on a Windows 2008 cluster node, it just didn’t...

Had an issue where a server would not allow logon via termian services each time you attempted to logon it would return this:     Soooooooooo, what to do here?  First, we made sure the account existed in the directory since that's why it...

Quick Solution:   Check the permissions on  the root of C: and ensure that BUILTIN\Users have Read access. Long Story: 8000FFFF == E_UNEXPECTED, not very helpful… Had a client where windows update was continually failing with the error code...

Ran into an issue this week that was strange.  When you TS’d to the box it would just show a blank background and nothing else.  If you tried to launch task manager it would just fail silently to the user (actually access denied in the debugger...

This is an FYI post so others on the intertubes can find the answer quickly. If you get this error: Log Name: Application Source: Application Error Date: 4.11.2008 07:20:41 Event ID: 1000 Task Category: (100) Level: Error Keywords...

So i know there are tools out there to do this but figured some would be interested on how to do this real quick with stuff that's already in the OS. 1) Turn off echos to make the out put clean (don’t forget to turn it back on when its done via “echo...

Just saw this being discussed internally and thought that it was quite useful to a lot of you out there so I thought I'd share.  The true boolean to grp.GetMembers tells it to recursively get the nested group members too.  I tested this out...

The Microsoft IPsec Diagnostic Tool is available for Windows Server 2008, for Windows Vista, for Windows Server 2003, and for Windows XP This should help you out when you have those weird "network" issues going on with some clients where IPSEC...

All of these are for kernel mode, these are just commands I use often that don't troubleshoot a particular problem, but are helpful in getting a general picture of the system. If you have a specific issue you're trying to understand, drop a note and I...

Just got released yesterday: X86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9ff6e897-23ce-4a36-b7fc-d52065de9960&DisplayLang=en X64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d647a60b-63fd-4ac5-9243-bd3c497d2bc5&DisplayLang...

  Those who are just getting into scripting might be wondering how to query info from remote machines using WMI and how to find useful information to query.  When I started out trying to learn some of the WMI syntax and gathering info, ...

I've been messing around over the last week making a tool that will frisk a remote machine.  It's been a fun project, a couple of items I got hung up on were if the machine was server core and if it was a VM.   I mean who would knowingly TS...

Just some random stuff as you get ready for 2k8... Getting the Classic cluster logs: Clustering in Win2k8 has undergone some major changes (for the better). One of those changes is that the cluster events are now part of the event stream so sifting...