Recently, I have found myself having to do some scripting with printers (among other things). As I was researching the best way to do this, I ran across some vbs scripts that Microsoft includes with at least Server 2003 (and it looks like 2008, as well). Here are some of the scripts I found: prncnfg.vbs … [Read more…]
This is mainly as a reminder for me where to find this information. Jorge has a great write up describing the process that a client uses to find the closest DC. Two things that interest me are some commands that can be used to determine both site and the closest DC: This command will get … [Read more…]
I ran across this last night. This is some common group policy settings that are preset for certain scenarios such as mobile user, kiosk or multi-user. It has some good information about some policies that I may want to implement in our environment. I will have to look this over some more. Implementing Common Desktop … [Read more…]
Sometimes, it is a challenge to know what groups a user actually is in. In particular, this includes not just direct membership groups, but also indirect membership (nested groups). You may have added a user to a group, but aren’t sure if the user is actuallly getting the security token for that group when they … [Read more…]
I thought I might mention that the MS Active Directory team had an excellent posting this week discussing the basics of Active Directory. This is a good place to go for a summary of AD.
Sorry I haven’t posted anything lately. I have been busy getting ready to do a number of domain migrations over the next couple of months. This has been a major project that I have been involved with at work. We have a total of 14 AD domains, and I am responsible for migrating 13 child … [Read more…]
Group policy preferences (GPP) are a set of new group policy extensions that came out at the same time as Windows Server 2008. The great part about it, though, is that the GPP does not require 2008 DCs and are backwards compatible with XP, Server 2003 and Vista. Client Installation In order to use GPP, … [Read more…]
When a user attempts to logon to a system using AD credentials, they have two options in how this will work. The first option (and the one that we typically use) uses NETBIOS. NETBIOS has some inherent length limitations built into it. For example, although you can name a computer with more than 15 characters, … [Read more…]
There is often confusion when it comes to Global Catalogs (GCs) running on a server that is also has the FSMO role of Infrastructure Master. I wanted to take some time to answer some of these questions, as well as make recommendations for how to configure your domain/forest. (Below is just a brief overview of … [Read more…]
Here are some steps to take to troubleshoot slow logons: Check event logs to see if there are any errors. If there are any errors, investigate those to see if they might be causing slow logon. Some possible errors could be network errors (can’t reach a DC, or possible kerberos over UDP errors), off-line files/folders … [Read more…]