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I am aware of Federated Services only in passing. In their usual manner, Microsoft has seen to it that there’s enough jargon littering the path to understanding what technology actually does to deter all but the most focused. Luckily, there’s Federated Identity and Microsoft ADFS explained and illustrated with Microsoft Paint!
Get thee hence and be [...]

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Mark Parris (Microsoft MVP) has a post about reducing client authentication loads on a DC.
Essentially, to reduce the number of client authentication requests processed by a DC, adjusting the server’s DNS weight and/or priority will do the trick. Specifically, the number of client authentications is decided by the weight while to ensure the DC does [...]

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We’re having a telephone conference call conversation with a vendor who will try their best to sell us a Network Access Control “solution,” as they say.
To be sure, this is a good thing to have in one’s arsenal, but I’m loathe to buy something that Windows 2008 includes for free—Microsoft doesn’t make too many things [...]

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As we all should know by now, Microsoft’s implementation of certain “standard” protocols is anything but and now I’ve found another, if one can believe a bunch of Brit systems administrators currently attending the same class I am.
The topic is Kerberos and the time skew built in to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.  We all know about [...]

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Here’s my problem: I have an LDAP server (OpenLDAP actually, although I’ve heard good thing about Fedora Directory Server) that I’d like to populate with Active Directory data.  Specifically, email data.
The project is an email service which consults said LDAP server for valid email addresses and drops the others.  Doing this, I’ve been assured, will [...]

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Bloody hell, I would love to exchange Exchange for something else.  Anything else.
Remember the problem I’d earlier about creating a RUS for a subdomain?  Well, it’s back.  After installing the Exchange tools on the subdomain’s DC, I attempted to create a RUS only to be met yet again with the most annoying error in the [...]

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According to the SANS instructor Jason Fossen, the only real way to disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP is to unload the NBT driver.  Simply checking “Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP” under the WINS properties tab of the NIC will not do it.
Open the device manager snap-in, choose the view menu item and now choose to show hidden items.  The [...]

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Good article at polishlinux.com that presents “a few effective methods to revamp the way you work in a restricted corporation-like network.”  If you can handle the shaky language (it’s a Polish site), it’s a very good introduction to SSH tunneling.

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The O’Reilly book of the above title is outstanding. You want to know DNS inside and out, get that book, stat!
Now I read that there’s a fifth edition on the way with a possible publish date of May 1.

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Ron is a Windows server 2003 and runs IIS6, naturally. Ron is also an Exchange server 2003 frontend. The time had come to change the website name of Ron from www.x.com to webmail.x.com and I thought there’d be a problem with Exchange. I’d also thought there’d be a problem with changing the SSL [...]

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