This is an FYI post for an issue we've seen on a couple of Windows 2003 SP2 servers internally. Hopefully if someone hits this in the wild they'll be able to find this post on the intertubes. Symptom: When attempting to connect from the client via...

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...

If you did not already know there is no boot.ini in Vista/LH. So how do you set usermode space to 3GBs? If you recall on x86 platforms there is 4GBs of addressable VM space. So by default that is split up equally. 2GBs for kernel mode and 2GBs for...

First off you can download SPA 2.0 here . I'm going to explain how to quickly use SPA, and then what type of data is returned in this post. What is SPA? So what is SPA and how can you use it? Well the official overview is: Microsoft ® Windows Server ...

Okay so let's look at some things in Vista from a sys-admin perspective that are good to know when your troubleshooting issues on your client's machines. Your client could be your user base, your family, or yourself. Guided Help You're Dad calls, he wants...

You might find yourself looking for "net send" in Vista and wonder where it went? Before you flip out, there is a solution. Use MSG.exe C:\Windows\system32>msg /? Send a message to a user. MSG {username | sessionname | sessionid | @filename | *} [...

Backstory As an Active Directory administrator you might find yourself in a scenario where an object/account/computer/etc gets deleted from the directory and then helpdesk/operations/management/VPs want to know the who, what , when, where, why, and how...

So you went out and got yourself a new server and it came with TOE functionality, and now you're playing Windows 2008 which has TCP offload enabled but you just want to know if its actually offloading traffic. Here's the only way I know of finding what...

I see this questions come up quite a bit about the interoperability of x86 and x64 domain controllers. Does replication work? Do the tools cross over well? Any gotchas that we should know about? Etc. Well I'm here to tell you that here at Microsoft we...

Ran into a case today where each time we tried to start sidebar.exe it would fail silently. No crash to investigate, no error, so where to next? First I set an IFEO for sidebar.exe to launch windbg.exe when started, by doing this it stops at the initial...

Currently we are running Win2k3 SP1, R2, SP2, Win2k8 Beta3, RC0, RC1, and RTM Escrow idomain controllers in production...  Since we're running some downlevel servers in the environment and I was interested in what is supported to be upgraded to Windows...

As the talk about hardware virtualization heats up from Microsoft and others you might find yourself wondering if the current hardware you're running supports it. My HP xw9300 workstation doesn't (older AMD Opterons), but it looks like my xw8400 does...

How to use a debugger to analyze a crash dump on a basic level....

Windows System state analyzer tool Helps create snapshots of the computer—some of which include fixed drives, services, drivers and the registry. Users can create two snapshots at different points in time and compare them to view differences. A detailed...

POWERCFG has the answer to that question and many others, like -LASTWAKE will tell you why your machine resumed form sleep or hibernate. I used to run into an issue where I'd wake up in the morning and find my laptop was at perfect temperature to cook...

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...

I know people have scripted this, but this is so much easier... You could use PSExec for running other commands as well, but someone recently asked me an easy way to get the IP info so here it is. If you just want to be sitting at a command prompt on...

If you've been running vista you might have come across this message: "A program can't display a message on your desktop" with the options to show the message or remind you later. So what's the deal with this? Gone over in detail in this doc , its...

I was tracking a high CPU issue this week and needed to know when one of my servers was pegged so I could investigate. I could of used perfmon I guess but I really like to do everything I can from the command prompt. I always like it when there is a tool...

Issue came in this week where when you attempted to logon to a server it would not authenticate your request and would give you a message indicating the "domain is not available". If you tried logging on via your UPN, then it would give a slightly different...

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...

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...

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...

I've ran into this a few times here and each time I stare at my screen for some time (depends on how much coffee I've had) and then remember this change. When you install Vista SP1 or install Win2k8 the console switch for MSTSC will be ignored (it's gone...

Backstory: With the advent of Windows Vista there are changes made in how the operating system determines if it can take a kernel memory dump or not. Starting in Vista the amount of memory allocated for kernel mode could vary dynamically . If the pagefile...