The hosting venue has changed to serve you better.
I recently found myself in a spot where I needed to troubleshoot a delegate issue–a user was set as a delegate but no longer was with the company and didn’t have a mailbox anymore, so periodic NDRs were being generated for mail destined for the delegate.… [ Continue reading ]
Recently, we renumbered a client’s network to reduce broadcast traffic and introduced two new redundant internet connections. Everything seemed fine in the initial testing, and we all went home.
The next day, when we were sifting through the fallout tickets, there was a recurring theme–Windows Mobile devices were no longer synchronizing.… [ Continue reading ]
A customer approached me with a some puzzling issues. They noticed a bunch of 1053 and 1054 Userenv errors in their event logs on their virtual machines. 1053 and 1054 error messages have very similar wording:
1053 – Windows cannot determine the user or computer name.… [ Continue reading ]
From time to time, many administrators have found themselves faced with a corrupt WMI repository. Here’s a quick fix. Copy/paste into a .bat file and run on the affected computer.
NET STOP WINMGMT /y RD /S /Q C:\Windows\system32\wbem\Repository %windir%\system32\rundll32 wbemupgd,UpgradeRepository FOR %%i in (%windir%\system32\wbem\*.dll)… [ Continue reading ]
Blue screens are no fun. Trying to resolve them without the proper tools can be even less fun.
In my experience, a large percentage of blue screens are the result of some poorly-tested or incompatible third-party device drivers. For the desktop crowd, a round up of the usual suspects includes scanner, printer, and video drivers.… [ Continue reading ]
For anyone who manages an Active Directory environment, you’ve undoubtedly come to understand the need for keeping time in sync. In short, you won’t be able to log in if the local computer time has more than 5 minutes difference than the logon server.… [ Continue reading ]
Lots of programs on the internet will claim to “erase your tracks” on your Windows-based computer. Well, you don’t need to waste your money. Windows XP and later come with a built-in utility, that when used correctly, will overwrite the free space on your hard drive with ones and zeroes.… [ Continue reading ]
From time to time, I’ve found myself in a situation where I’ve needed to re-create MSDB. Unfortunately, most of the guides on how to do it give just basic overviews, leaving the unlucky admin muddling around.
Here is a real step-by-step for SQL Server 2005.… [ Continue reading ]
If you read my previous post on configuring Windows Server 2003 DHCP to serve PXE clients, you probably noticed option 066 for Boot Server Host Name.
What is a Boot Server, you may ask?
In simple terms, a boot server runs a TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) instance that is used to transfer small amounts of data.… [ Continue reading ]
Today, I was lending a hand to one of our Linux admins who was trying to get his servers Kickstarted. For the uninitiated, Kickstart is the Linux equivalent to Windows RIS.
PXE stands for Pre-boot eXecution Environment. PXE clients (commonly known as “diskless workstations”) rely on DHCP to tell them where to go for their boot configuration and software.… [ Continue reading ]
Since a lot of folks (myself included) are still running a lot of Exchange 2003 in the enterprise, I though I would post a bit about setting the track alignment properly in various kinds of storage.
According to Microsoft, when creating disk partitions, the “Disk Management” MMC snap-in mis-aligns the partition with the underlying physical disk.… [ Continue reading ]
A few months ago, I ran into a problem when copying large files between two tiers of a network in one of our datacenters. I was doing a hardware upgrade on some Hyper-V hosts in a DMZ and was copying the images to a backup server while I swapped out hardware components in the Hyper-V hosts.… [ Continue reading ]