Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controllers have left Windows NT 4.0 behind. Windows Server 2008 would still let the old guy play along, but no more. This fact is not apparant until you start to look closer: DCPromo in Windows Server 2008 R2 will not let you select Windows 2000 mixed mode for your domain functional level. …
Author Archives: Morgan Simonsen
Working with differencing disks in VirtualBox
For some time now I have been trying to make persistent differencing disks work in VirtualBox. The idea is to have one base disk with all the software that all the VMs you want to deploy needs. Typically the OS, all patches up until the time you created the base disk, common apps like Flash …
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RAXCO Offers free version of PerfectDisk Defrag
Get it here: http://blog.raxco.com/2012/03/29/perfectdisk-free-defrag-beta/
Poor-man’s Active Directory backups (export really)
Sometimes I need a “copy” of an Active Directory domain, partition or LDS instance. Usually this is when I remove decomissioned domains in a multi-domain forest and want to keep a record of what was left when I deleted it. You can do this With LDIFDE.EXE. Here is an example command to make a full …
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VirtualBox 4 and physical NICs
I use Oracle VirtualBox for much of my testing and demos. Yesterday I figured I wanted to connect two machines in a way that enabled the VMs on one talk to the other, while at the same time keeping the traffic isolated. The easiest way I could think of was adding a second NIC in …
Troubleshooting Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 Installations
I had a hand in rolling out Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) for a customer recently. Some of our clients did not get FEP installed even though the SCCM client was installed and working correctly, and they had all prerequisites present and had successfully received the advertisement and downloaded the files from the distribution point (DP). …
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Authentication errors on NLB cluster
I configred a 2 node NLB cluster to load balance Remote Desktop Session Hosts with Windows Server 2008 R2. These were virtual servers running on VMWare so I selected to use multicast mode for the cluster. The cluster IP (.3) correctly resolved to the cluster multicast address with ARP. The cluster formed and converged successfully. …
The Case of The Strange Folder Redirection Error
I was enabling Folder Redirection for some Windows 7 Professional machines, or rather, for the users of some Windows 7 Professional machines. The users already had a server based home directory with a My Documents folder, which also had data. The purpose of the operation was to, firstly, enable Folder Redirectin, but also to merge …
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Script to find outdated computer objects in Active Directory
Computers have accounts in Active Directory and log on just as user accounts do. The “user name” of a computer is its name with a dollar sign appended, e.g: MYPC1$. The password is set by the machine when it is joined to the domain and changed every 30 days by the machine. Just as with …
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Desktop.ini customizations do not take effect
You copy a desktop.ini file into a folder to customize and maybe localize it. You have correctly set the file’s attributes to Hidden, System and Read-Only, but still your customizations do not work. To make it work you need to set the Read-Only or System flags on the folder where the desktop.ini file resides. As …
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