One of the new and long awaited features in IIS 7 is support for FTPS or FTP over SSL.  By default all FTP data is transfered in clear text, including the user name and password.  From a security point of view you can see this is a bad thing.  FTPS to the rescue!  Before you begin you will need to download and install FTP for ...

Typically hotfixes are released on the second Tuesday of each month as you are all well aware.  Occasionally, I can personally only remember three including this one, there are out of band hotfixes released.  While we don’t normally post hotfix release notifications considering this is an out of band release I wanted to let you all know ...

We’ve covered a creating a cluster and clustering a service and one other thing to configure in your cluster is failback policies.  These control if, how and when a failed resource is brought back online on the preferred owner.  As an example, say Node 1 in your file server cluster goes offline.  The resource will failover to Node ...

We’ve covered setting  up a two node failover cluster in Windows Server 2008 and now that we have that running we can start to cluster some services and/or applications.  In this example we’ll cluster File Services to create a highly available file share.  To start we can simply right-click Services and Application under the cluster ...

If you have ever set up a Windows cluster in Windows 2003, 2000 or if you were brave enough NT4 you know it has always posed a number of challenges that usually required some specialized skills.  Well in Windows Server 2008 that has changed thankfully and we can whip together a two node failover cluster in minutes!  Before you get ...

As with anything you should be backing up your Hyper-V machines.  I think that just goes without saying.  Backing up Hyper-V has gotten easier with the addition of VSS and Windows Server Backup (WSB).  WSB is a new feature in Windows Server 2008 that replaces the old NTBackup from days gone by.  It is not installed by default ...

Here at the LazyAdmin we have talked quite a bit about using BitLocker with Windows Vista. With the introduction of Server 2008 you can now also leverage Bitlocker with your 2008 servers. This is particularly attractive when deploying Read Only Domain Controllers (RODC) to remote locations where physical security is questionable. One BitLocker ...

We have talked about enabling BitLocker Active Directory integration in a previous post now we will take a look at prepping your domain to implement this integration.  To take advantage of the several of the more compelling feature such as RODCs and Windows 2008 domain controllers we first need to extend the AD schema in our current ...

One of the nice things with RODCs is the ability to control cached credentials.  You can also pre-populate passwords for specific users, like a branch office user, in case the branch office connection goes down but this can be a security concern if that server gets stolen.  Server 2008 has a nice way of handling this so you can sleep ...

The next video in our Server Core series is going to cover making our demo server into a RODC or Read-Only Domain Controller.  One pre-requisite for a RODC is an existing Windows 2008 based DC in the domain.  You also need to run adprep /rodcprep before you can add the RODC.  Other than that it is pretty straight-forward but without ...

In the next video in the Server Core series we look at the remote management options.  There are a number of options, RDP (still just a CLI), remote MMC consoles, PowerShell, WinRM/RS  Because Server 2008 follows the secure by default standards these are all turned off and need to be enabled, again from the command line.  Have no ...

Last week I posted two videos on configuring the server and client side for DHCP Based Network Access Protection.  Over the next two weeks I'll be posting another set of videos on configuring Server Core.  The first video is going to cover the OOBE or out of box experience.  Server Core is like any other server out of the box, you ...

The other day I posted the first half of this video with the server side setup of NAP.  This video will cover the client side setup and testing on both Windows Vista and Windows XP SP3. Note: Double-click on the video to go full screen. If you want to give these demos a try yourself be sure to grab the lab build guide and demo scripts ...

Server 2008 is out and one of the very cool features is NAP or Network Access Protection.  This feature allow you to protect the internal network from threats.  There is a nice entry on Wikipedia explaining NAP but the TLA way is to show you the quick steps to get it done.  While I could write it out I figured video would be cool as ...

Quick post to let all you Lazy Admins out there that Windows Search 4.0 has been released. There is a long list improvements. I have been using the preview release for the past month, and I definitly have noticed performance benefits on my laptop. For those who haven't tried Windows Search, it's a Lazy Admin's best friend. The only downside is the ...