Microsoft have recently released a very cool tool that allows you to visually check our your Active Directory Replication status. Normally you would use repadmin to check the status of AD and the results of that would be viewed in the command window, and require interpretation. This tool is a GUI tool that allows less experienced admins to check the status of Active … [Read more...]
How can I reset a computer accounts password with Active Directory?
Have you ever come across scenarios where the computer account password is out of sync with the Active Directory version of it? Or maybe you’ve done something silly like build two machines with the same name and added them to the domain one after the other? Either way – there’s a few ways to fix it but I recently discovered that Microsoft had provided an update to … [Read more...]
Why does my server appear under Client Computers on SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 Standard?
This is one I’ve heard a lot before and it’s easy to solve. When you add Desktop or Notebook computers to SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 via the http://connect wizard, they get added in and put by default into the Client Computers OU inside Active Directory. The SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 Standard console displays any computers in that OU under the Client Computers section on the … [Read more...]
How do you run a Domain Controller with a Dynamic IP Address?
SBS 2011 Essentials is a bit different from all other Microsoft servers in the past. Traditional network design calls for the Domain Controllers to have a FIXED IP address within your network. Well in SBS 2011 Essentials, Microsoft understood that most clients could not figure out how to disable the DHCP on their routers and therefore they redesigned SBS 2011 … [Read more...]
Disaster Recovery of older Active Directory Domain Controllers.
Today we were doing a Disaster Recovery for a client. Well not so much as a Disaster Recovery, but a recovery of old data from an old tape. The tape was from April 2011. The data we wanted to recover was from an NTBACKUP of Exchange 2003. We needed to recover the CEOs Mailbox as he’d “lost” certain emails that were now considered important. Anyway … [Read more...]