Once all the domain controllers in a domain are running Windows Server 2008 and above, you can change the SYSVOL replica set to use DFS-R (as opposed to FRS). The key benefits of migrating to DFS-R are Self healing functionality (e.g. journal wraps) Improved...

Well….half a KB to be precise :) But I still feel good that I contributed to an official support article in some minute way. Incidentally I wrote the ldp.exe based details in KB 2001769. M

As a premier field engineer I have a responsibility to do several on call shifts a year. The week just gone was one such on call shift learned the importance of updating drivers  during it. Allow me to elaborate. I got a call around 2AM Wednesday...

I have run into a couple of scenarios where this setting has caused issues and hence decided to blog about it. Windows 2008 X64 based domain controllers didn’t replicate with each other. However they were pulling updates inbound from other DCs (that happened...

repadmin’s w2k3_bridges_required setting is often a misunderstood setting. Even I was confused to its usage. So when elite PFE engineer Glenn explained in an internal DL, I felt it would be good to share with others.   The +W2K3_BRIDGES_REQUIRED...

Just a quick post. Was onsite recently and had a DC that was not advertising is a time server. DCDiag confirmed it. Checked announceflags and it was set to 10 in hex (0x00000010) instead of 10 in decimal (0x0000000A). Changed registry value and use “w32tm...

Just a quick blog post about something I saw recently. I was at a customer site performing an ADRAP and I ran into one of the customer’s domains where FRS was not converging. Among the troubleshooting steps I tried to verify that DNS had records for the...

I’ve been doing some research to prepare for my upcoming first delivery of AD Troubleshooting workshop. The agenda of content includes DCLocator and Netlogon content. Hence this post. For the real detail on dsgetdcname and details on the nltest /dsgetdc...

This is a quick post to get me back into the spirit of blogging. Some time back I was onsite performing an ADRAP to assist the customer with some issues they were having with their AD. Among the many issues we found was one DC reporting the following...

I was at a customer today who was in the process of moving their AD from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 x64 platform. In the process at some point he changed the DHCP servers to use the new Windows Server 2008 based DC/DNS servers for name...

So I haven't written anything in quite a while and felt compelled to write something I recently ran into. A customer of mine is in the process of implementing Windows Server 2008 RODC in their branch offices. In order to do that, they are planning to...

Just thought I'd post a quick observation I made on my laptop. Some time back I ran into an interesting issue on my laptop where I could create XPS documents using the "XPS Document Writer" printer or even using applications like Office 2007...

I just had an issue at a customer where we were troubleshooting an issue where users could not use the SQL Management studio to connect to a SQL server remotely. Local login to SQL server interactively and then launching the client tools worked. The cause...

I have a vista SP1 based Toshiba M400. As we tend to regularly dogfood software builds internally I also assist with self hosting any software builds I am interested in. These builds are not perfect and sometimes they cause laptops to hang, deplete resources...

I just found out today that the command listed to view all audit events for Vista and Windows Server 2008 does not work on installations if using a language other than English USA. The following command will result in an error as follows. C:\Windows\system32>wevtutil...

Consider the following scenario. You install ADAM/LDS as a particular user account. Lets assume its a normal domain user account with local administrative rights on a member server. So the install proceeds normally and you create the ADAM instance. Assume...

I've decided to start a blog here where I intend to publish little nuggets of info as I find them. I hope others find them useful. :) Cheers M Disclaimer: All postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights . This weblog...