When it rains it pours I suppose.  Just after I dropped the last loopback policy processing post, I got an email from another friend at Microsoft asking about how replace mode actually works.  What he wanted to know exactly was when does the user configuration portion of policies which apply to the computer object get applied.  Is it applied when the computer starts up?  Or is it applied when a user logs on? It’s a fair question.  The loopback policy setting is config... [More]

Hello all, Eric here again. Today, I wanted to expand a bit on a relatively recent posting that AskDS posted - http://tinyurl.com/askds-post. I'm sure the escalation engineers have seen that issue a number of times, one of which was with a customer of mine when that customer hit the CritSit button.  Obligingly, I escalated after I spent an hour or so stumped as to what happened since I was told that no changes were made. They chose to escalate with good reason though, as their environment ... [More]

Greetings all, it's Eric here again, wait nope...this is the first time posting to CB5! I'm a guest blogger on the Crandall brothers' site today and I wanted to talk about an interesting case that I had regarding the ADWS service not starting on most of the DC's at one of my customers' hub site. I want to cover what kind of impact that can have, so I'll talk about what ADWS does, requirements of ADWS, how to troubleshoot the issue, and some workarounds to fix the issue. First of all, I'll give ... [More]

I wanted to follow-up on a previous post and respond to a newsgroup post with this loopback policy processing model. I am taking the inspiration for this from the newsgroup post though there is some deviation for the sake of the illustration.  Okay, let’s go. In our globally-applied Default Domain Policy, a screen saver timeout is set to 30 minutes. Right now, this is the only screen saver timeout policy in the domain. This policy setting exists in the User Configuration portion of the D... [More]

It’s not the first time that we’ve talked about it and it certainly won’t be the last – Microsoft’s well-intentioned proliferation of information sometimes can actually create confusion through incomplete information or contradiction, perceived or real.  Loopback policy processing is one of those technologies that is destined to fit into this bucket. It comes up pretty frequently in the newsgroups and not long ago we responded to one such question here:  ... [More]

Okay Microsoft, you are doing a good job of evangelizing Windows 7 and more importantly, this time around you are getting a lot of help from the consumers of the operating system.  People love the operating system and they are willing to spread the news for you – or maybe for themselves since everyone likes to bear good news.  You should be proud of that but you should also remember that everyone is going to find out about your new OS pretty much whether you advertise or not.  It’... [More]

I wanted to put together a list of common alerts from ExBPA, and ExTRA in one location. I have provided my customer with tons of health checks and though the information in the tools are great sometimes I find that more information is needed for additional knowledge of the problem and more importantly how to resolve the issue and any side effects with making changes. I will continue to add to this list but here is a good starting point.   ExBPA Critical: MaxPageSize   The maximum... [More]