I’m often asked about aging in adamsync so I thought I’d present the more general problem here for people to ponder. Hopefully this gives some context around the problem which aging in adamsync is supposed to address. Imagine you are writing a tool which sync’s changes out of AD. You (the person running...

I found myself writing a piece of C# which would go hunt for objects in lost&found today. This is a pretty straight forward task….find that container, pop in to it and search away. I usually do this by looking at the lost&found well known GUID (which is GUID_LOSTANDFOUND_CONTAINER_W in the platform...

I was recently pinged by a friend who is rolling out LH in their production environment. They were having an interesting issue where the LH DC showed these two events, in this order: (event log entries snipped some for brevity) Log Name: Directory Service Source: NTDS General Event ID...

Over the last few months there have been a series of threads in regard to max <fill in the item here...there have been many> in a database. These items have ranged from database size to # of objects and other such things. I figured, after the latest thread over on activedir.og, I'd do a little...

One of the things that has always impressed me about keyboard, mouse and monitor support is that it just works. That is, you can plug in almost any keyboard, mouse and monitor, on basically any video card, and it there is some level of support provided by your OS/BIOS/etc. Independent of the OS. Independent...

From the inbox..... <quote> You say the requirements are Win2003R2 with the ADAM installed from the R2 CD. Will your guides work for us aswell? Running Win2003 SP1 in AD-environment and our developers are running standard Windows XP with the ADAM downloaded from MS download site? </quote>...

Now that we have ADAMSync synchronizing our data over, we should probably investigate the most commonly asked for transformation: proxy user transformation. When we introduced proxy bind in ADAM RTM, customers seemed to really connect with the semantic. If anything, I’d argue we have customers overusing...

In our previous ADAMSync runs we synchronized all attributes except those in the <exclude> tags. This is probably ok for our tinkering, but in a real scenario, you might want to consider picking those you want instead of getting everything but those you say not to. Why? Well, consider the costs...

Earlier in this series of posts I changed our sync target from form “OU=” to “DC=”. This was done to carefully skirt around a small issue. Now with our new found knowledge of logging in ADAMSync, let’s give it another try. So let’s go ahead in to our previous config file and change this line: <target...

Over the course of the next few posts we’re going to start modifying all sorts of things in the configuration. Depending upon the particulars of your environment this might or might not pan out. :) As such, we should probably take a quick look at the logging available before we break anything too badly...

So now that our ADAM schema is ready, we can go ahead and start configuring ADAMSync. We need to do three things to get ADAMSync running at this point: 1) Modify the XML file. The XML file is used as the configuration point for ADAMSync, so we’ll tweak this file to have the settings we desire. 2) Install...

Before trying to synchronize much of anything, we need to make sure the required schema elements are in place. NOTE: I would estimate that around a third of all questions I've received on ADAMSync came back to schema problems. It is critically important that the schema be configured properly. For ADAMSync...

Welcome R2 RC0 ! As you might have heard, it’s hit the streets. With R2 comes the latest version of ADAM . ADAM has been a download from Microsoft.com since 2003. Since that time, based in part on customer feedback, the decision was made to bundle ADAM in to the OS as an optional install. For those of...

Here in the EEC, was asked a good question the other day, thought I’d pass it along. So the scenario is that the engagement in question was to run SQL 2000 SP4 on a box running Win2k3 x64 Enterprise Edition. The server had a good chunk of RAM (I think 8GB, but it might have been 16GB). The question...

The other day over on activedir it was mentioned that in SP1 we added sidHistory to the list of attributes preserved on tombstones. I thought I’d mention this here, and provide some clarity around what actually changed, since there was some confusion around what we did and how we did it. In looking at...

Kim Cameron has been blogging up a storm on identity futures in MS products. It's always interesting to think in to the future. Most of my work focuses around today and today++, not nearly as much in to the distant future, but I'm glad someone is looking out there. :) InfoCard is a super interesting...

I just learned that Jim Johnson is blogging. Very cool indeed. I'm a fan of that team's work. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim not too long ago, and was really impressed with what that team is up to. Jim recently blogged about some of their Longhorn work. Extending transactions to file system operations...

Over on the EEC blog I just posted that I'll be working with iSCSI some. This is a new area for me, one I'm not really all that familiar with. Quite honestly, I'm not much of a hardware guy, so I suspect I'll be asking the hardware guys for help. :) But I am a software guy, and I love working with fast...

Today we put out this page which talks about upgrading to the x64 Windows. Here’s the best part: The Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Technology Advancement Program enables customers who have purchased Windows XP Professional (32-bit) to exchange it for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. You...

Over on his blog, my mgr Bryce mentions the new iSCSI evaluation going on here in the EEC . I for one don't really understand iSCSI at all. I'm not a hardware guy. :) However, I do like to talk about directory performance, and I've never seen either AD or ADAM deployed on an iSCSI device. I am going...

WS2003 Service Pack 1 brings with it all sorts of goodies. I’ll try and mention many of the AD ones over the next few weeks, but one I can’t help but mention sooner rather than later is access based enumeration. Rather than digging in to the feature, let’s instead start with a scenario. Assume you...

Some time ago I posted on constructed attributes. There was a snafu in an item I posted (and by snafu I mean mistake). I said that constructed attributes are only returned in base searches. This is incorrect in the general case. This is true for some constructed attributes (like tokenGroups) but not...

Sometimes I just thirst for a feature someone else has. In talking with an MVP on the phone tonight we got to talking about ESE, and chatted a bit about the new ECC feature introduced in Exchange 2003 SP1 to help with -1018's. Info on it is here if you're interested. I sure do wish we had that in AD...

I love little things. Here is one I noticed this morning. Go ahead and empty your recycle bin. Now create and delete two files, then go to empty the bin again. Note that it says “would you like to delete these 2 files”. Ok, now empty the bin, and only delete one file. Now try and empty the...

The schema itself has a whole lot of interesting nuances. Within the schema we define multiple different types of attributes. One of the most useful attribute types we have might just be the constructed attribute. Constructed attributes are interesting in that they aren’t a single value in the database...