mcs.ireland.blog/infrastructure : dd

Powershell - videos and utilities

mcsieinf — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:31:47 GMT

The Channel9 guys have posted an interesting video where the Powershell team discuss the goals of Powershell, where it is going in the future, and showing off the environment in action - check it out at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=309510...(read more)

New Intellimouse feature with latest Vista drivers

mcsieinf — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:27:00 GMT

If you install the latest Vista drivers for Intellipoint mice you get a nifty feature. The drivers are located at http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/vista/vistasupport/intellipoint.mspx Once installed, click Pearl (where Start used to be) | All Programs...(read more)

Windows Defender final version now available

mcsieinf — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:52:00 GMT

Defender has been in beta for a while but a few weeks ago the final release was signed off. Defender is our free anti-spyware software which runs in realtime. You can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx...(read more)

solshare.net - Public Sector IT community

mcsieinf — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:24:00 GMT

A colleague of ours liked rain so much he decided he didn't get enough of it here in Ireland so he relocated to Seattle - the only place on the planet that makes the Irish climate seem hot and sunny :-) As part of his new role he has set up an online...(read more)

Managing GPOs with scripts

mcsieinf — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:16:00 GMT

Most people are familiar with GPMC - the Group Policy Management Console - for administering and troubleshooting GPO's. If you're not familiar with it - download it now, you're wasting your time managing GPO's the "old" way :-) What a lot of people don't...(read more)

Terminal Services client v6.0 released

mcsieinf — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 12:35:00 GMT

This is now available to download for Windows 2003 & XP. There are quite a few new features - more info is over at the terminal services team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/archive/2006/11/29/remote-desktop-connection-terminal-services-client-6-0-for-windows-xp-and-windows-server-2003-english-only-released.asp...(read more)

Vista has Released to Manufacturing

mcsieinf — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 21:58:00 GMT

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/11/08/it-s-time.aspx Nice work. Congrats to the Windows team. When Jim says "it's time", for me that means "it's time" to rebuild my laptop - it's had about a dozen Vista beta builds on it over...(read more)

Foldershare - real-time backup made easy

mcsieinf — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 00:09:00 GMT

MCS is like most consulting organisations in that as a consultant, you are working on customer sites a lot of the time. A downside of this is that you don't get to fully avail of "corporate" solutions such as folder redirection, or the use of home drives...(read more)

Making IPSec easier

mcsieinf — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:51:00 GMT

A lot of people think IPSec is complicated. It's actually pretty easy to implement and manage, and can bring extra ammunition to your defence in depth strategy to help protect critical systems, or to reduce the threat of malware or viruses. The main reason...(read more)

Centro Beta is now available for testing

mcsieinf — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 11:53:00 GMT

You're probably wondering "what is Centro". If so (or even if not, and you know what Centro is!) - check out this blog...(read more)

System Center Capacity Planner update

mcsieinf — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:51:00 GMT

SCCP is a great tool for anyone who is designing/planning new MOM or Exchange deployments, or for those who need to determine what is required to support increased growth of an existing infrastructure. I definitely recommend that you take a look if you...(read more)

I've installed Office 2007 - where are my menus?

mcsieinf — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:41:00 GMT

For some Office 2000/2003 users, the move to Office 2007 can be a little bit daunting at first. After a few hours you really get used to the new ribbon bar and using the product is much more natural and productive than the old-fashioned way. However,...(read more)

Migrating from Access to SQL

mcsieinf — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:30:00 GMT

In desktop deployment projects we see customers spending a lot of time testing departmental Access databases for compatibility with newer versions of Office. Quite often a home-grown Access database becomes critical to the business. At that point, it...(read more)

Speeding up Adobe Reader

mcsieinf — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:15:00 GMT

I used this method ages ago but have rebuilt my laptop dozens of times over the past few months to keep up with Vista builds. I kept thinking that Adobe loaded much quicker on my old machine and then remembered that I had to configure something to make...(read more)

Active Directory limits

mcsieinf — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 17:24:00 GMT

I've been doing a bit of research around the theoretical limits in an AD environment as part of a project I'm working on. It's unlikely that many people will ever actually hit these limits (if you do, you probably need to take a fundamental look at your infrastructure architecture and how you support it!) but I thought I'd post them anyhow - they may be useful to someone somewhere :-)

- maximum number of GPOs that can apply to a user/computer: 999
- maximum number of DNS servers in an AD-integrated zone (without manually adding the details): 850 (Windows 2000), 1300 (Windows 2003)
- maximum number of supported DCs in a given domain: 1200
- maximum number of members of a group: 5000 (Windows 2000), unlimited in Windows 2003
- maximum number of DHCP servers in a forest: 850 (Windows 2000 SP1 or RTM), unlimited (Windows 2000 SP2 or later and Windows 2003)
- maximum number of UPN suffixes that can be set through the UI: 850 (you can set more if you need to via ADSI scripts)
- maximum number of objects that can be created over the lifetime of a given DIT (i.e. the AD database on a given DC): 2 billion