Hi,   Just a quick note to publicise that MBAM 2.0 is now out, and each of AGPM 4.0, DaRT8.0, App-v 5.0, UE-V 1.0 each received their own updates to Service Pack 1. They are bundled in the new MDOP 2013. Read more about it here at the new home for...

Hi,   I recently became the proud owner of the fantastic Sonos PLAYBAR . And while the Sonos team is considering creating a Windows 8 App to control their devices, I found a neat little hack to get the DLNA portion of the Sonos to become a “Play...

Hi, One of my recent posts was recently polished up enough to appear on the MSPFE blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mspfe/archive/2012/12/06/lots-of-ram-but-no-available-memory.aspx That blog roll is a new initiative within the Premier Field Engineer community...

Hi again, I think the post title is pretty self explanatory. Just to clarify it a little, the customer who hit this problem found that A work-around was to run the service as LocalSystem. Mails between mailboxes on the same server would not be delivered...

Hi, I struck a problem at a custom and the impact, while it seemed minor on the surface, was actually a big deal for their migration project. In fact, the large team they had assembled to migrate users from one forest to a new forest had stopped while...

############################## ### UPDATE (22 March 2013) ### The ADMX and ADML files for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are now available as a separate download. This includes 185 ADMX files, and is the complete set of all ADMX files for these...

This blog is about the ability in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to apply a SID to every scheduled task and use that SID to apply permissions elsewhere in the Operating System. Services already have this feature from Vista and newer. The idea is...

Hi This error code is a very generic output to a KMS client having problems activating. To view your output, run slmgr.vbs –ato When troubleshooting this problem, we checked the following details – if any were a problem, they would generate this error...

Hi, Another quick post with a non-very-obvious solution, this time on a new Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster. The case went like this: The OSes of the nodes were built according to the security requirements of the customer We added the Failover Clustering...

Normally in AD, all attributes are readable by “Authenticated Users”. Some attributes should inherit permissions, but should not be readable by “just anyone” To protect attributes like this, they can be marked as “confidential”...

I faced this problem recently at a customer. They had pure Windows XP with Office 2003 deployed to their clients. These clients were accessing a SharePoint 2003 site. When they started deploying new Windows 7 clients with Office 2007 they found that when...

Hi, another juicy customer question with a cool solution. The problem is this: on all workstations, the built-in Administrator account is disabled. Restriction groups are used to populate the group “Built-in\Administrators” with domain groups. No “back...

I had a question for a customer recently which needed some investigation, as the seemingly “easy steps” to export and import DFSN configurations didn’t do what either of us expected. KB969382 lists the actions to take in the event of your DFS Namespace...

I had a question that I thought I would share the answer for. A customer was deploying multiple identical servers with multiple NIC into a testing lab as virtual machines. They needed a way to beat the plug and play detection of NIC cards so that they...

If you enable /3GB in the boot.ini of a Windows Server 2003 x86 server, you risk running out of address space for the kernel. You can tweak this by adding the switch /USERVA=wxyz where wxyz is the number of megabytes that should be allocated to the...

I had a question from a customer and thought I’d share the answer with everyone. They asked “I want to upgrade our Central Store of ADMX/ADML files for Group Policy from Windows Vista SP2/Windows Server 2008 SP2 to Windows 7/Windows Server...

I was working on a case with a customer for something that was too weird to ignore. We wanted to use DNS Suffix Search Orders on the clients so that clients could query using short names for servers in DNS domains which weren’t their own. e.g. A PC in...

I’ve been working on helping remove WINS from a customers network. One of the big problems was identifying the remaining clients still using WINS, and just what they were using it for. We used Network Monitor to capture WINS name resolution queries on...

When installing Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controllers on Hyper-V R2, events were generated by AD about being unable to disable write caching for the disks where AD files (database, logs, SYSVOL) were stored. No events were logged for the boot disk...

I hit a problem recently where we were seeing this event in all the terminal servers in a session broker farm: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc775303(WS.10).aspx Event ID: 1014 Source: Microsoft-Windows-TerminalServices-SessionBroker-Client...

Hi If you’ve heard about this vulnerability which has been located (and published before it was advised to MSRC – Microsoft Security Response Center ) and want to see if there are machines on your network attempting to exploit it, here’s a Network Monitor...

WSUS 3.0 SP1 introduces a new command line tool to help admins set different upstream proxies (one for HTTP and one for SSL). You could set the same proxy server, but running different proxies for HTTP and SSL on different ports. Currently there is a...

Hi I was recently involved with a proof of concept/functional discovery for a large, shared infrastructure hosting company who provide services to financial organisations. The requirement we were testing (which we confirmed works – hence this blog) was...

Hi, This is my first ever blog (welcome to 2002 Craig!). I have just visited a customer who had a big mail flow problem immediately after they ran /prepareschema for Exchange Server 2007. Lets look at why. prepareschema is the process you first...