As much as a bookmark blog as anything else so I know where to find it. You may have seen the malicious software removal tool come down through WindowsUpdate/MicrosoftUpdate. What I didn't know was that a version with the latest updates is released on the second tuesday of every month, and can be run...

For those of you who are available on Monday (27th June), this is a reminder that there is an all-day Technet event running at Cavendish Conference Centre in London about how you can deploy, manage, migrate-to, secure and extend the value of your directory platform. Myself and two colleagues from Microsoft...

Someone made a more appropriate choice of name (thankfully!) given some of the alternatives which have been on the table over the past few months. The next version of SUS (Software Update Services) will be officially called Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), or simply Update Services for short. ...

I should have posted this previously, so apologies to those who attended my recent session on AD Troubleshooting, Diagnostics and Recovery. Relating to the demonstration for registering and using the AcctInfo.dll to add a new tab to the Active Directory Users & Computers tab for users, the account...

After a successful domain migration, you may be in a situation where it is necessary to remove the sidHistory attributes from objects in your new domain. There are many ways to do this, and many migration tools provide that capability straight out of the box. You could of course use something like ADSIEdit...

I mentioned at last nights "Active Directory Diagnosis Troubleshooting and Recovery" Technet session how to turn NTDS diagnostic logging on which causes the KCC to write events to the event log. All the information plus more besides is published in Knowledgebase article 314980 .

One of the demonstrations at last nights "Active Directory Diagnosis, Troubleshooting and Recovery" Technet session included the steps to install esentprf.dll to allow monitoring of performance counters for the extensible storage engine (ESE) database underlying Active Directory. The steps to complete...

There are occasions when you need to extend the Active Directory schema for applications. Besides the best practice of test, test and test again, and the alternative of using ADAM ( Active Directory in Application Mode ) to avoid changes to your corporate schema, sometimes needs must. In these occasions...

In my line of work, I talk to lots of people about the "hows" of upgrading to the latest and greatest technology. Consequently, I've referred many people to the link below which is a great source of tips and links to other information worth considering when upgrading your domain from Windows 2000 to...

The Scripting Guys released version 2 of their "Scriptomatic" tool a couple of weeks ago. Don't be put off by the somewhat frivolous name - it has some very true value. One such example I frequently use is for the WQL queries in WMI filters when building Group Policy Objects - this tool saves a lot of...

While on the subject of Certificates/Encryption/IPSec/PKI in general yesterday, I was looking around for some good information on how PKI works to post up. One white paper which stuck-out from the pile was published in December last year (so it's reasonably up to date) by David B. Cross and Avi Ben-Menahem...

Following my session in Birmingham on 13th January, here's a list of the references I referred to. Apologies to all for the delay in posting this. Firstly, Jeremy Moskowitz's excellent book "Group Policy, Profiles, and Intellimirror for Windows 2003, 2000 and Windows XP" can be found on Amazon . 1 Redirecting...

This is one of those small almost unheard of "things you can do in Windows" tips. The left image below is a "normal" Windows Task Manager screen shot. If you double-click anywhere in the graphical part of the tab, it changes appearance to the screen on the right. Click image to enlarge. You...

ActiveSync 3.8 is now available for download Of course, the official download page doesn't say anything about being supported under Windows Server 2003 (my main laptop OS), but it does work without any of the workarounds such as those I blogged about last month on an RTM build. At least it does quite...

I use this quick-tip frequently to determine if I'm a local administrator. The trouble with some tips is that you just know them, they're so simple so you don't bother to tell people as you're under the assumption they "must have known that". This exact circumstance happened today in the office when...

The scripting guys did a great job with a series of webcasts under the banner of "Scripting Week 1" earlier this year. They included topics such as "WMI is not a Four-Letter Word" and "Scripting Files and Folders Makes Me Happy". The week 1 webcasts are archived and available for viewing here. The really...

Matt Hester recently finished a great series of 14 webcasts about the ins and outs of Group Policy. If you missed these the first time round, or just want to know more about group policy, they're available for re-run on the Microsoft Technet site .

No, it's not a typo! A "blogcast" is probably a new term to you as it's been made up by the IT Pro Evangelism team in the UK (not quite true, but it's nice to think we got there first). A blogcast in this context is a webcast delivered through blogs. So what's new about that I hear you ask? The answer...

Although published a few years ago, one of the most useful books I keep coming back to is "Windows 2000 ADSI Scripting for System Administration" by Thomas Eck. As an IT Professional with a development background, this book has proved invaluable time and time again. Even with no development background...

Internet Explorer on my test Windows Server 2003 box has been playing up for a couple of days - every time I clicked a link which opened a new window, I got a blank window with nothing in the address bar. Annoying, but sometimes you don't have time to sort it out, so you end up working around the problem...

Something which you often see Microsoft people do in their demonstrations is have the Operating System description and build number displayed on their desktop. While sysinternals do a fabulous job with their Background Info (bginfo) tool (in fact I use this myself), there is a built in facility right...