Active Directory relies on accurate time for a number of reasons. One of this reasons is Kerberos authentication, which by nature can only cope with a difference in time (time skew) of five minutes between the Kerberos server and client. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think the time skew limitation and the overall Kerberos … Continue reading "Active Directory Time Sync (broken by default)"
Category: Best practices
Best practices
Domain Controllers: Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter?
When making choices for a new Active Directory environment, choices eventually need to be made for the Operating System for the Active Directory Domain Controllers. The key question here is whether the Enterprise and Datacenter Editions add any substantial functionality to the Standard Edition.
Active Directory in Hyper-V environments, Part 4
Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter Edition offers the ability to make virtual machines highly available by leveraging failover clustering. This however is not a good idea in the case of Active Directory Domain Controllers. In this post I’ll explain why Hyper-V High Availability for Domain Controllers is not a good idea and … Continue reading "Active Directory in Hyper-V environments, Part 4"
Upgrading your Active Directory to Windows Server 2008
Last time we discussed how to transition your Active Directory to Windows Server 2008, which was something a lot of you were interested in. This time I'm talking in-place upgrading Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain Controllers to Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers.
Transitioning your Active Directory to Windows Server 2008
You might be running Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain Controllers at the moment and you're looking to replace these servers with Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers to utilize the new features of Windows Server 2008. You might also be looking to replace your aging Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 … Continue reading "Transitioning your Active Directory to Windows Server 2008"
Deploying and managing FireFox centrally
As an IT Professional you might get the question to deploy Mozilla's FireFox browser on the workstations of your users. I must admin FireFox is a pretty good product and Mozilla does a good job building and promoting it. In fact: In my opinion it's the only company I know that effectively took on a … Continue reading "Deploying and managing FireFox centrally"
Active Directory on separate volumes
I had and have seen numerous discussions with people on the benefits and drawbacks of putting Active Directory files and folders on a separate volume or even on several separate volumes. Time to makes some things clear!
Deploying Exchange Server 2007
Microsoft today released a couple of documents to aid in the deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. These Microsoft Word compatible documents (no XPS documents this time) provide descriptions and overviews of features, guidelines for planning, and steps for deploying an Exchange 2007 organization. They correspond with the predefined four supported deployment scenarios.
Conserving energy with Active Directory
Treehugger magazine has a very clear statement on Microsoft Windows XP and its "high-performance" yet "energy-consuming" default settings this week. They boldly state Microsoft Windows XP wasted $25 billion of Energy with the help of Foreign Policy.
Deploying Windows Vista centrally
Microsoft Windows Vista has been designed from the ground up to be easy to deploy. The guys introduced a couple of new technologies to help you accomplish an organization wide deployment. Along with the technologies that we already had to our disposal, these are bundled in the Microsoft Solution Accelerator for Business Desktop Deployment. (BDD for short)