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 found that it's a binary blob and not easily...

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 that something most be wrong with the report and...

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:   C:\Windows\system32>lodctr /q:NTDS...

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 directory.  Active directory has put “hooks...

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 driver file versions matched on all the nodes of...

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 key below and have the subkeys inherit the permission...

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: You might find yourself in a situation where you...

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 add " \\brad-dc-01\HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows...

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 work remotely.   Against 2k3: PS C:\Debuggers>...

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 appeared to be complaining.  So I opened LDP...

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 8000FFFF.  When looking in the Windows Update...

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).  My user account was in the admin group...

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: Classic User: N/A Computer: xxxxxxx Description...

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 on”). 2) The set is a sequence of numbers from...

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 is deployed. Description from KB: You can use the...

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'll see if there is a command to help you out. ...

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=en Overview Microsoft Remote Server Administration...

  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 started with ScriptoMatic .  I found this...

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 to a server if they knew it was server core? ...

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 through the cluster logs is a thing of the...

You've probably heard that netmon3.1 is out , but you might not know that you can easily launch a capture at the command prompt.  I find this useful when we're waiting on a repro, we want a capture, but we don’t know when that's going to happen.  Sure you could set this up in the GUI...

System Page Table Entry (PTE) issues are some of the top support issues for servers that run large server applications and have a relatively large amount of Random Access Memory (RAM). PTEs are structures used to track pages of RAM, similar to the way a telephone number is used to track a telephone to...

Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool Project Description: Ever have a performance problem, but don't know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format...

Yes you are going to want Windows 2008 in your shop.  We've been running 2k8 for over two year sin production and I'm very proud of the product we're shipping shortly.  Some of you will want to start thinking about what's new in the OS, what has changed, performance, and deployment.  Here...

This was one issue I worked on for quite some time a few months ago. We found that Vista clients were taking forever to download group policies from domain controllers in the regions while Vista SP1 and XP clients did not see the issue. If the local DC was running LH or Windows 2003 SP1, we didn't see...