If you ever needed to know if and where a certain user account was being used to run a service, a scheduled task or an application pool, then you’ll find this post helpful. SOX regulations, security procedures or your boss may require you to have the...

Welcome to part 3 of the series… hopefully you have enjoyed the first two parts where we have discussed client logon and clients failover between Domain Controllers and sites. In the last part of the series we're going to discuss Domain Controller replication...

So in Part 2 of the series we're going to discuss the following scenario: The challenge in this scenario is to make the clients in the different Branch sites to failover to their closest Hub sites. It's obvious that HUB is the best option for failover...

Hi All, Michael here again, and this time I would like to talk a little bit about Active Directory replication and Disaster Recovery sites. Since the not so recent events (taking place on 9/11) many companies started to invest time and money in designing...

The topic of this post may sound a bit strange with many big words, but the reason of the topic is one.. One picture is worth a thousand words, so what I’m trying to explain is this: Unknown publisher?? I can’t install it for users...

Hi All, Hello world! This is Moti. Just as Michael and Guy, I am a member of the Israel PFE team, specializing in Performance/Internals, Remote Desktop and Failover Clustering. I have been working recently on a case and came across an interesting...

Disclaimer: Do NOT in any way attempt to perform the steps outlined in this post in your production environment. If you do this, things will break. Take my word on it ! Disappeared attribute ? How that can happen ? I mean, either the attribute is in...

Hi, That's just a short post while I'm working for a longer one. A couple of days ago I was debugging an application, and I wanted to set a breakpoint for the DsGetDCName function to figure out the flags being passed to the function – ...

As you know several attributes in the Active Directory are composed of BITWISE flags. This means that the attribute consists of several flags which may be (or may be not) set on the attribute, and querying these attributes may sometimes be a real pain...

Hi, Thank you all for attending my Session.. hope you had fun :-) Here’s a list of all references on the topics i’ve been discussing: 1. New AD Features: a. Recycle Bin - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd392261...

  Michael here again, and this time I would like to discuss the Group Policy preferences drive maps feature and some caveats on the way. The Group Policy Preference is a powerful new feature introduced with Windows Vista and later. Using the GPP...

I’ll start with the obvious: Kerberos is the way to go. NTLM is less secure and is being de-emphasized in the recent versions of the OS . Your first option should always be to attempt to make your applications work with Kerberos. But things take...

  This question popped in my mailbox – how can you use a script to search for deleted objects in the Active Directory, just as described here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/258310 . Well, obviously you can’t script ldp.exe, so the second option...

Well, as promised, this one is a technical post. Many words have been spoken about DFSR and there is not much I can add when it comes to inner works of DFSR and ways of troubleshooting it. But let’s assume for a moment that our DFSR deployment...

Hello everyone ! This is Guy. Just as Michael, I am a member of the Israel PFE team, specializing in what we call “Platforms/DS”, which basically boils down to anything related to core OS and AD. While I’m not new to the blogosphere it’s been a while...

  Hello everybody, this is Michael again. This time I would like to discuss the internal processing of DNS Scavenging. As you know, setting up aging and scavenging for DNS Zones and Servers is something usually recommended in order to delete “old...

Hello world, This is Michael. I’m a member of the Israeli platform team and I’m here to write about some attempts and eventually the success (wohooooo!) of implementing and using the DirSync control from S.DS.P (System.DirectoryServices.Protocols...

  Welcome to the Israel Platform PFEs Blog. The Israel Platform PFE team currently consists of 4 members and we handle mostly AD, Performance, IIS, Clustering and other platform related technologies. We all have decided to open this blog in order...