Author: rzomerman

New Active Directory 2008 Forest Recovery Documentation

So you have implemented Active Directory 2008 .. I hope you did some investigation in backup/restore and offcourse you must update your disaster recovery documentation now.. to help you on your way Microsoft has released a new whitepaper on Forest Recovery for Windows 2008… read before and while fixing your AD.. (preferably before ) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=326C8A7A-DCAD-4333-9050-A6303FF3155C&displaylang=en

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"Windows Installer does not permit installation from a Remote Desktop Connection"

When you try to install an MSI through an RDP connection you could get the “Windows Installer does not permit installation from a Remote Desktop Connection” dialog. Everyone seems to think that the \tsclient<drive> is a regular network share.. but it is not!.. it’s a software feature of Terminal Services service. However, if you find yourself in the position where you must use the mapped drives for installing software, either copy the software first, or map the \tsclient<drive> first.

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Poor man's iSCSI

If you want to implement iSCSI it’s best to keep the normal network traffic and the iSCSI traffic apart from each other. And that usually means buying a 2nd switch capable of reaching high speeds and jumbo frames. Off course for production systems I recommend spending a few bucks.. however if you only want iSCSI in you lab, there are easier ways of creating a switch!.

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Administrator Lock-out?

As many may have seen, the Administrator account has some special privileges. It can logon to a workstation/server when no Global Catalog is available and it can always logon. Well seems that always is not entirely true. Just as a regular account the Administrator account gets locked when the password attempts reach the limit as […]

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Group Policy Preferences ready?

When introducing the Group Policy Preferences in your organization, you need to make sure all your systems have the Client Side Extensions software installed. This CSE package can be distributed by WSUS but can also be deployed separately. But for GPP to work you must also have XMLLite installed if your IE version is below 7.

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How to hack Vista without bitlocker

While browsing I stumbled upon a nice video explaining the trick the get a command prompt during the loginscreen of a user.. and that command prompt is in the system security context. They say physical access is full access and without bitlocker they are right.. take a look at the short video below.. http://www.offensive-security.com/movies/vistahack/vistahack.html

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Windows 2008 SystemStateBackup

With the release of Windows 2008, the backup mechanism of Windows has also changed. No more NTBackup, but Windows backup, available to your 2008 system as a feature. Also part of that feature is the systemstate backup, you know the one that is utterly Important to restore Domain Controllers. Now the GUI will not let you perform a single systemstate backup (only full backups including everything) and backups can be stored on a network share. But let’s say we want a systemstate backup only?!

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Did you install Exchange?

Lots of us install Exchange (what ever version) in our infrastructure.. do you know what Exchange does to your Active Directory.. make a statement order the shirt 😉 Link

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Windows 2008R2 features part V: DHCP Split-scope

DHCP is the mechanism that gives most client these days the tools (ip address) for connectivity. Most companies however do not realize the importance of the DHCP service and do not cluster nor have another server as standby when the DHCP server fails. If the DHCP server fails, most clients will not receive a new ip address and will seize to work on the network. While clustering is improved in Windows 2008 and sort of made easy for administrators, most of them are reluctant to implement a failover cluster for DHCP. In Windows 2008 R2 we have Split-Scopes, remember the 80-20 rule for DHCP servers, it kinda the same, but then made easy. For this article we have a single domain controller and two Windows 2008R2 servers.

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Visio Stencils

<update> The links are now actually working.. you can download them again </update> My previous studiographic.nl website was not too great.. so I moved everything over to the blog.. if you are looking for the Visio Stencils for Virtualization.. check Visio Stencils….. _R

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