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If you run  an  AD managed by various different people on various different platforms like I do, this is important news for you: Jeremy Moskowitz found a bug and in his unique way, posted a YouTube video about it:

This comes at a good time because I was just about to create a central store!

In playing around some more with my new server 2008 R2 VM, I discovered new options for managing AD, including the ability to restore data from AD snapshots.

This article in the most excellent magazine, simple-talk.com, provides clear instructions on just exactly how one can use this new capability. Good writing too, by Ben Lye.

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So there I am, working away in my new VM of Server 2008 R2 which I’d just made a Domain Controller, when I decided to load the ActiveDirectory module in PoSH (Power Shell) then play around with AD-specific commands. (I’m in the process of generating a list of useful resources to our delegated OU administrators so they can quickly create computer and user objects without needing a GUI).

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Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and author that I’ve written about before (I think—I’ll have to look it up in my archives). He is also a gifted speaker.

This brings to mind a recent event I attended recently; yet another disastrously boring event, I should add. Speaker after speaker with monotonous voices and schmaltzy slideware, boring the pants off me. That I can take. What galls me further however, is that the majority of these yahoos, presumably giving the same speech over and over throughout the country never thought it wise to buy a remote clicker.

Nope. One by one, they’d walk up to the wall on which their slides were projected, make a few points then walk back to the computer, tap a key to advance the slide deck forward then it was back to the wall for more inane prattle.

Over and over. Siigh. The other part of this which blows my mind is how often they advance a slide and are genuinely surprised by it. They have no idea it was there and they are completely unprepared to talk about it so they walk back to the computer to click “next” all the while making lame excuses about “marketing slides.”

Eee-diots, to quote Ren.

You see this and then you see a speech (any speech) by Malcolm Gladwell and you see why people think he’s a genius. This post from a Financial Times blog attempts to ascertain Gladwell’s skill by asking the man himself for the secret. Here’s the money quote:

“I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them”

Wow, what a concept: rehearsal and practice!

I don’t know why, but I can’t easily find information about Exchange (and OS) server performance and when I do, it’s likely to be less than readable. Microsoft must pay some of the driest technical writers this side of Tucson.

The folks at msexchangeteam.com have posted an article which contains quite a goodly number of resources and information about Exchange performance troubleshooting.

Apart from the terrible title (‘Triaging’? Really?), useful information.

Running the Professional version for a few days. I liked the “Easy Transfer” wizard that made moving personal files … well, easy so my first taste of Win7 is positive so far.

I also like the stability (so far) of the OS. It allows me to install and use most of the software I had running on Vista with a reasonable overhead which leads to good performance. I have no numbers so far to corroborate this feeling, but that’s all I need right now is a good, fast machine.

Here’s a tip I picked up to change the logon background image: edit the

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
Authentication\LogonUI\Background

key to change the value of the OEMBackground to 1.

Now create a folder as follows": %windir%\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds
Place your desired logon wallpaper in that folder. It must be named backgroundDefault.jpg and must be under 256KB in size.

More (annoyances) as I run into them.

Once again, I find I don’t know as much about the inner workings of Active Directory. Joe of joeware dissects a TechNet article about AdminSDHolder which uses his fine tool (AdFind) to query AD for security information. Joe finds a few things lacking in the article (calls it “rough.”)

Once again, it strikes me that one can administer an Active Directory without requiring a deep knowledge of how things work under the hood, so to speak. For most, I expect this is not an issue. Microsoft excels at hiding the complexity of its products and many “administrators” are quite content with yelling for technical support help (at approximately $250 a question) when the SHTF, thank you very much. I am dissatisfied with continuing to manage the largest AD forest I have ever managed without an exhaustive, rigorous knowledge of AD’s nuts and bolts.

Of course, there is an altogether simple course here: study. So it is with some renewed vigor that I break open all my resources to drink deeply from the AD (and Exchange) bowl of knowledge.

I wonder what I’ll find? Will I be even more dissatisfied when I find out how “bad” things? The deeper one travels in the bowels, the closer to crap one gets.

Comes the news from Nasir Ali (Exchange Escalation Engineer, the poor bastard) that Exchange Server 2007 SP2 setup fails if all domain controllers are running Windows Server 2008 R2.

The error is as follows:

[ERROR] Cannot find at least one domain controller running Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 or later in domain ‘DC=DCName,DC=com,DC=DCName’. This could be the result of moving domain controller objects in Active Directory. Check that at least one domain controller running Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 or later is located in the ‘Domain Controllers’ organizational unit (OU) and rerun setup.

Grammatically, I would expect that reading “Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 or later” technically includes Windows Serfver 2008 R2. As a technician, this would drive me absolutely nuts.

Thanks goes to that beneficial giant of all things software, Microsoft, for once again exhibiting (my) truism that your left hand doesn’t necessarily need to know what your right is doing to still make oodles of money.

This is major good news from the MS folks: I recently discovered it is possible to automate metadata cleanup, required after the forced removal of an AD Domain Controller.

Even better, on DCs running Windows Server 2008, deleting the DC’s computer object in ADUC (Active Directory Users and Computers MMC) initiates the cleanup process automatically.

More information here.

An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
—Robert A. Humphrey