September 2009 Entries
Remember: If only some of your Domain Controllers are Global Catalogs make sure that the domain controller that holds your Infrastructure FSMO role1 is not a Global Catalog. The reason for this is that a global catalog that holds the infrastructure master role will stop looking for and removing phantom objects in your directory since it will have no phantom objects (we all know global catalogs hold partial information on every object in the directory) because it knows about every object in the directory if even a little. However, if all your domain controllers are global catalogs, then it...
A quick tip for anyone who is experiencing issues searching their mailbox on Outlook 2003 (with or without Windows Search) and Outlook 2007 (preferably with Windows Search enabled on non-Vista/7 machines). If the mailbox mode is in Online mode, that is, it is not in Cached Exchange Mode, you might want/have to enable Cached Exchange Mode for Outlook 2003 in order for your searches to work properly. Now I have found that for Outlook 2007 search to work (though I have to admit, I have only verified these findings when Windows Search was installed), you...
With the advent of Active Directory, the old school Security Accounts Manager (SAM) account names are almost a thing of the past, not that anyone got the memo. Most people still authenticate to their domain using their SAM account name, which is usually DOMAIN\username; with DOMAIN being the NETBIOS name for the AD domain. While this is still (as previously mentioned) widely used and acceptable, in my opinion there is a more appealing method for having users log into their accounts on Active Directory networks, and that is using the User Principal Name (or UPN) suffix. A UPN...
A few minutes ago I was going over the Server 2008 Performance Tuning Guidelines1 and one of the recommendations for the Hyper-V role caught my eye, it was something I’d previously read before, but for whatever reason wasn’t currently implementing in my infrastructure: The Synthetic SCSI Controller.
The synthetic SCSI storage controller performs better over the emulated IDE controller, and while Hyper-V requires an IDE controller be present in a virtual machine for booting the VM, Microsoft recommends that an administrator mount any other VHDs with a high expected I/O rate to the synthetic SCSI controller mainly because of reduced CPU...
I have two HTPCs at home, one in my bedroom and one in my living room (*cough*, the living room HTPC is coming soon), as well as another notebook that my lady uses. These machines are a perfect candidate for the Windows 7 family pack that Microsoft is offering for $150, which is good news for me as far as licensing goes.
Since these machines will are simply for entertainment purposes, and web browsing, they don’t need any features other than the ones offered by Home Premium, unfortunately, the RDP host is not available for Home Premium, so I will likely...
Quick reminder to myself, since this can easily be looked up online, the following code snippets are useful for mass renaming files in a directory, for instance when renaming a series of TV Show episodes into a format that TV Rename can recognize and subsequently rename with correct episode title information for use in XBMC. By the way, these code snippets were spread out to multiple lines for ease of reading, but PowerShell doesn’t care about them and when I write them into the console myself, they are all in a single line. ...