I have been working with a customer recently who has a print server that has had its spooler crashing after a 3rd Party service running on it was locking up and freezing and falling over. One of the signs it was about to fall over was running the following...

Apologies for not blogging for sometime. I have been away on vacation, out of the country on training plus work commitments so add that up and it equals and enforced hiatus. Plus of course do not forget the Volcano :). Well I am back now and have an interesting...

As part of the Active Directory Forest Recovery process the white paper talks about the KRBTGT Account. I often get asked what is this account and why do I need to reset its password twice ? Well here is the answer Key distribution service center account...

Certain customers have recently been experiencing an issue which I wanted to bring to your attention. Issue with Domain Controllers Windows 2003 sp2 Wmiprvse.exe consistently consumes a high percentage of CPU on Domain Controllers and svchost.exe...

A customer the other day was looking to configure his Domain Controller in a remote Branch Office behind a firewall. The question was what ports are required for Active Directory Replication. The answer is the following; Port Assignments for Active...

I have been working quite allot with Group Policy objects and have recently been involved in troubleshooting them. As a last resort if all else fails, and your Default Domain Policy and Default Domain Controller Policy is beyond repair,or somehow has...

I was recently working on a customer site and notice in a significant number of System Event logs displayed the following error message. There are multiple accounts with name MSSQLSvc/ABCServer.contoso.com:1433 of type DS_SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_NAME. If you...

Hi, Sorry for the delay since my last post. I have been Mad busy but things are getting onto a bit more of an even keel. Anyway alot of us within Premier Field Engineering use our Laptops for Everything including Demos utilising a range of Vhds. Plus...

I was working at a customer site the other day, and they were looking over my shoulder as I was typing in some Repadmin commands. They asked me the question what is your recommended top 5 Repadmin (plus friends) commands. Well that got me thinking and...

This has been a question that has come up with several of my customers recently. Therefore I thought this would be a good topic to discuss. Modifying the Schema is something that is a necessary action prior to carrying out installation of Directory Enabled...

Hello, I had an interesting customer request recently that I thought I would share with you. Prior to an upgrade to 2003 they had an account which was used for Remote Desktop Users. On upgrading to 2003 this account became replaced by a System Owned Object...

Well I am back ...whether you want me here or not. I know I have been really lazy at blogging recently....my excuse....work and catching the a series of ailments from my children. Anyway back I am . During my day job I use a really useful tool to map...

Well I was only aware of one particular way to modify the displayname in the Active Directory, and then this only worked for New users. How to change display names of Active Directory users http://support.microsoft.com/kb/250455/ Well a colleague of mine...

The Question around ideal sizing of a Page File has been a topic of conversation that Customers have been asking us recently. I am going to make a stab in this Blog to put together some of the current thinking around this as I think some of the documentation...

Myself and a colleague Mark Empson have been developing a New Service entitled a GPO Health Check that looks at every aspect of the health of your Group Policies. Well one of the tests involved was checking for any Group Policies that had only the Read...

Well my friend and Colleague Justin Zarb showed me something funky in Office2010 beta today. He was running his installation with a great “Black” colour scheme in Outlook, similiar to below; The way he set this up was to go into options in word and choose...

The Active Directory 2008 Operations guide is now available for download from this location. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=291bddb7-edc6-4e6d-9852-a9a14991d67c&displayLang=en

I have been recently doing quite allot of work with File Replication Service. The File Replication service is used to replicate the contents of your sysvol folder e.g. Group policies and Scripts. The difference between FRS and Active Directory Replication...

I have been visiting a few customer sites where they are virtualizing their Domain Controllers. This always makes me a little nervous as this should always be coupled with strong control and management of this environment. If this is not well managed...

I had an interesting investigation the other day with a customer of mine with reference to the role and failover of the ISTG role. In the customers scenario they switch off the ISTG and several other servers in a very busy site to simulate a outage scenario...

I have been using Outlook 2007 for quite some time now and have been using the RTM version for the last month or so. Anyway I have been noticing a slowing down recently in loading up Outlook and the new circle Hour Glass seemed to be sat "doing nothing...

The TSL (Tombstone Lifetime) of an object in the Active Directory is significant especially when related to Backups Restores and Lingering Objects So today I am going to give you the basics of what Tombstones mean. What is a Tombstone ? T he...

The DLT object can cause NTDS.DIT Bloat in the Active Directory. This will of course mean you are replicating objects around in your Active Directory unnecessarily. So firstly what are DLT objects DLT Objects See below as taken from http://support.microsoft...

I am learning Powershell as much as my time allows.The importance of Powershell in Exchange 2007 cannot be underestimated. Powershell drives Exchange 2007. In point of fact the Exchange Management Console (the new graphical console for Exchange 2007)...

Well I am sat in the departure lounge of Aberdeen Scotland Airport after a really interesting and enjoyable Customer Engagement around all things Active Directory. Aberdeen has enjoyed some lovely Spring Weather,while I have been there and is very pretty...