A few weeks back I was onsite with a customer that was experiencing some issues with their Exchange servers after applying the latest rollup the night before. After we resolved the problem, the customer asked for a solution to validate all core Exchange services were online after patching their Exchange servers. Since the customer has hundreds of Exchange servers, we knew the only good solution would be to automate the task so I decided to build a PowerShell script. What I have done is broken ... [More]

For those of you that have taken the time to contribute your valuable comments in the past, we want to sincerely thank you.  As you may have noticed, a short time ago, all comments on the site were reset including the comments of valid contributors like Dinesh, Florian, Mike, Eric, and others.  That was an unintentional action of the site administrator that occurred while trying to clean up a larger problem – comment spam.  Each day, as we search through for the rare, legit... [More]

While I was out at the Microsoft Certified Masters program for Directory Services a while back, I realized that I made a mistake in a post about NETLOGON SRV registration intervals.  Thanks to Microsoft Platforms PFE Matt Reynolds for helping me catch this error.  I apologize to everyone for the mistake in my post.  The traces which are attached to the original post show the correct intervals as you’d imagine but I didn’t do a good job of writing to that.  I have ... [More]

!!! WARNING:  IT Systems Administrator blasphemy ahead !!!  Actually, here it is right here:  I know that NetDiag is a staple tool for systems administrators but I’ve never been a big consumer of the tool and that’s mostly because I just don’t care for it.  There is some great functionality in the tool but a lot of it can be found in other tools without all of the excess effort and output.  The other thing is that there are some limitations and known issues which often m... [More]