Microsoft Office 2010 volume license edition use the Volume License 2.0 mechanisms to manage activation. Office 2010 will activate against our campus Key Management Service (KMS), without user intervention, in a manner similar to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Occasionally, the activation process doesn’t work. Problems are usually related to network communication with the KMS. [...]
Update: better yet, read about the -Join and -Split PowerShell operators. Live and learn. —Geoff Something I’ve found myself missing in PowerShell is a function to combing the elements of a list with a given separator, like Perl’s join() function. I finally got annoyed enought to write one. It seems to do what I want, so [...]
On Server 2008 and 2008 R2, if your Domain Controllers aren’t configured to require LDAP signing and disallow simple LDAP binds in plaintext, Active Directory Domain Services logs a warning event on startup, and summary events every 24 hours. A couple weeks ago, I followed the recommendation to enable logging of unsigned and plaintext LDAP [...]
I’m upgrading the components of the user provisioning system I built. Previously, I used ActiveState Perl and the UWinnipeg PPM repository to get the Net::LDAPS stack working. This time, though, I decided I wanted to use the native architecture of my Server 2008 R2 systems. I am using the Perl64 install from ActiveState, but I [...]
I’ve been working on deploying a load-balanced Remote Desktop Gateway service. I deployed the first farm member, then cloned it to create a second member. The second member was throwing Error events, which has the description "There is no domain controller available for domain CAMPUS." Now, I know that the domain controllers are up and [...]
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We use BIND for our DNS, and allow certain systems to perform dynamic DNS registration. This arrangement has worked well for years. When I started deploying Server 2008 R2, I noticed that they weren’t registering PTR records. At the same time, I noticed a bunch of errors that seemed to indicate that Dynamic DNS wasn’t [...]
Since we don’t use DHCP in our server subnets, I frequently have to locate free IP addresses when deploying a server. I remembered reading a TechNet Magazine article by Don Jones that used the PowerShell PROCESS block and the Win32_PingStatus WMI class in a sample script. I took that and rewrote the function a little: [...]
I’m in the process of deploying a couple new Server 2008 R2 domain controllers. I’m using two IBM blades, each having a pair of Broadcom NICs that I configured in fault-tolerance teams. In trying to verify the configuration of one of the DCs, I used the command: dcdiag /test:dns The output surprised me: Starting test: [...]
I’m working with Microsoft to identify a problem I’m seeing with LSASS, possibly related to the VSS snapshot created by our backup software. At this point, I need to be able to capture the memory state on the system, even if I can’t log into the box. There are several ways to trigger a crash [...]
Geoffrey Duke
Sr. System Administrator,
University of Vermont