This week I had some time to spend in my lab at home, so I thought I would catch up on some overdue projects, My biggest project was to get my lab up to Exchange 2007 from 2003. The complication here is that although I have a rack of “real” servers, I don’t have any spare capacity. Virtual PC to the...

As companies get acquired or you migrate off different platforms to AD, there can be quite a mess in terms of Domains and Forests. Lots of ambitious IT folks try and keep a handle on this and consolidate domains quickly as things change. This is a great idea, and keeping things simple is definately the...

Last week, I decided to take a few vacation days and fly out to Ogden, Utah to help my wife’s old company upgrade from Small Business Server (SBS) 2000 to SBS 2003. They are a small, 10 person operation that manufactures high end ski and board apparel ( www.descente.net or www.ridedna.com ). The have...

I admit it, I am not the all-knowing Microsoft consultant I should be. The real truth is, our support folks have the best tools to diagnose problems a lot faster than I can muddle through things. I have had the occasion over the last few weeks to call Microsoft Support (PSS) several times with...

Unless you have been on vacation on the moon for the last few days, you know that there is new exploit in the wild that mainly affect Windows 2000 and pre SP2 Windows XP OS’s called Zotob (and variants). This worm is hitting some of the same big name companies that were crippled by CodeRed, Sasser and...

Check out an this interesting article from Steve Riley about trusting administrators. Trustworthy Administrators -- by Steve Riley < http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=3563067 >

If you have never seen Microsoft's Steve Riley speak on security, I highly encourage you to take a look at his archived presentations . Steve and I worked together here in Denver when he was with the Communications Sector. I got the chance to travel with Steve a couple times, every time we got...

I don't think I have ever used the "Configure your server wizard" in Windows 2000 or Server 2003. But, I just spent the day with our lovely support people at Microsoft trying to determine why a white screen mysteriously named "res://ws03res.dll/SecOOBE.hta" kept popping up when our developers logged...

I have lately had a couple projects where we wanted to collect Security events into a central repository. This is a good idea in production environments, especially those that are exposed to the Internet or a partner network. Some beneficial things to consider about rolling up security events: ...

<originally posted on MSN Spaces blog on April 30, 2005> Since I have been doing some work with MOM 2005, I thought I would share a couple things that I have noticed that might bite you in the butt. MOM 2005 requires Windows authentication to the SQL server. This can be a big problem in...