Hardware dies, it always has and it always will eventually.  And if you ever had a Windows 2000/2003 domain controller die on you, you’ve no doubt gone through the painless but time consuming process of removing a failed DC.  I wrote an article on it a few years ago and while you might be planning to migrate your DCs to 2008, or already ...

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 ...

In a recent article I wrote about the Standard User Analyzer, one of the tools available to mitigate app compat issues with UAC.  Some applications require a little more work to get them working and for these situations you can use the Compatibility Administrator which part of the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.0.  Again it is a ...

One of the biggest blockers to deployment in application compatibility.  Whether it is a new OS and existing applications or new applications on an existing OS these are they kind of things that drive you nuts.  There are many tools available now to help address these issues, one being the Standard User Analyzer.  With Windows Vista ...

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 ...

As with each edition of Windows Server, the 2008 release also includes some new additions.  In order to take advantage of some of these new features you need to upgrade your Active Directory Forest and Domain functional levels.  You can read about the Windows 2000/2003 domain and forest functional levels as a refresher if you like, but ...

In case you have been living under a rock for the past month you have most likely heard about the DNS cache exploit recently discovered by Dan Kaminsky.  This might be one of the most severe flaws discovered as it was cross platform affecting everything from Windows to Linux, UNIX, Cisco IOS etc....  It was so big in fact that all the ...

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 ...