This is a foundational post.  There are a few posts which are coming that require a basic understanding of what a service is and how it is described beyond just knowing where and how to manage services.  This post is more of an abstract conceptualization of what a service is and is intended to lay the groundwork for future posts.  We can all recognize common services and we know where to go to manage these services when we want to start, stop, or otherwise modify them.  But,... [More]

Have you ever noticed that ping and nslookup give different results when resolving a name? This happened to me many, many times and it caused me some frustration before I made the effort to understand why it was okay for the results to be different. Let's look at some of the reasons that nslookup results can be so different from ping results. There are really three important things to understand I think: How the Windows client resolver works (at least at a high level). What ping is intende... [More]

Aren’t Restricted Groups great?  I love how they keep our groups safe.  Now, what are Primary Groups again?  Oh, that’s the Domain Users group, right?  What do Primary Groups have to do with Restricted Groups?  Here’s a scenario… You’re the domain admin for your organization and management just informed you that you need to grant temporary domain admin rights to an application owner to do his install.  You’re not thrilled with t... [More]

During my accreditation process for the AD Health Check (the predecessor to the ADRAP) we spent a week with our peers in a brief review. As part of the accreditation process we were each assigned a technical area of AD to present in front of the class. I was assigned AD replication by our instructors and I was both excited and nervous. Excited because I had always loved and been interested by AD replication. Nervous, of course, because I had to mock teach it to my very talented peers and I knew ... [More]

I honestly believe that one of the greatest barriers to proficiency for IT administrators is terminology.  There is such a variety of terms, acronyms, and usages, that IT is really like its own language.  The good news for those of you that speak it, you are now fluent in at least two languages.  For those of you working your way in, remember to roll your ‘R’ – and good luck with the lingo. While we are still working on getting a common understanding between us,... [More]

It was my first AD environment that I owned and I was much more excited than I was wise.  I made lots and lots of mistakes, some of them benign and some of them…well, didn’t go unnoticed.  It was a medium-sized organization based on Windows 2000 and we had quite a few sites and domain controllers.  It was a true hub and spoke topology and there were a fair number of site links back to our hub site.  We had decent and reliable connectivity and found that we could ... [More]

The nature of Microsoft’s directory service clients provides for inherent fault-tolerance in the event of a failure.  There are often questions about how, or if, this failover works properly.  In this post, we are going to see the failover in action.  Before we get started though, there are some conditions that can prevent this standard behavior which are worth discussing.  This is not a comprehensive list but these are a few common reasons that a client may not failover: ... [More]