Windows 2008 PKI / Certificate Authority (AD CS) basics
Keywords : Windows 2008 PKI Certificate Authority certutil certreq template root CA Enterprise CA convert pfx to pem generate custom certificate request subject alternate name san attribute Today’s blog post targets the deployment of a Windows 2008 server based Certificate Authority (AD CS) and will discuss some common scenario’s where certificates are used / required. […]
Icons Shortcuts and SendTo items in Windows XP/2003/Vista/2008
Fixing missing icons & shortcuts : Send To “Compressed Folder” is missing : Click Start->Run In the “open” box, type “cmd” (without the quotes) Click ok Enter the following command and press “return” rundll32 zipfldr.dll,RegisterSendto (you should not get any warnings or errors) The first time you are trying to zip, you may be prompted […]
Windows 2003 Server Network Load Balancing (NLB) for IIS based SMTP services
In this post, I will explain how to set up 2 or more Windows 2003 servers to use the Windows Server built-in NLB functionalities in order to provide high availability and network load balancing for IIS based SMTP services. Requirements You need to have at least 2 servers that communicate to each other over 2 […]
Securing Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory
According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2008 is the most secure Windows server version ever. Windows 2008 does include many features that will help increase overall security of the OS, or assist you with securing AD, the network, etc. Most of the features/roles available in Windows 2008 are not being installed in a default installation of […]
Monitoring disk space utilization growth/increase with Operations Manager 2007
By default, Microsoft Operations Manager includes some monitors / rules that have the ability to monitor the disk utilization of system and/or data disks of your servers (and clients). This is a really nice feature, however there may be reasons why this kind of monitoring would still leave you one step behind of your users. […]
Add ‘Command Prompt Here’ when you right-click in Explorer
Open your favourite registry editor (regedit will do just fine) Go to “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT” Locate the “Folder” key Open the “shell” branch Create a new key called “Command Prompt Here” Open this key and create a new key called “command” Open “command” and double click the “default” entry (REG_SZ) Type the following : cmd.exe /k pushd […]
Monitor file age with Operations Manager 2007 (vbscript monitor)
In this post, I will explain one of the techniques to monitor the age of a given file, using vbscript and Operations Manager 2007 This is what the script looks like : Option Explicit ‘ ‘ Script that returns the difference in number of days between now() and ‘ the last modified timestamp of a […]
Monitoring Robocopy logfiles with Operations Manager 2007 (vbscript monitor)
One of the reasons why the company I work at has taken the decision to implement Operations Manager is because the daily task to go through a pile of interfacing and backup log files became too time consuming and demotivating for the people involved. Armed with Operations Manager and a basic vbscript, I have set […]
How to properly restore (objects in) the 2003 AD database
Windows 2000 /Active Directory has been around for more than 7 years now. I’ve been using AD for almost 7 years, and due to its stability, I never had to recover a deleted object in AD. (Knock on wood). So it’s not a real surprise to find out that a lot of admins don’t even […]
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After migrating this blog from my old 2008 RC1 server to a new 2008 RTM server, I noticed that my Sharepoint alerts stopped working. I was still getting an email message when I created a new alert definition, but when an alert should have been triggered, I was not getting an email. Conclusion : the […]