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]

Like most Windows administrators, I grew up on the NET executable for command-line service management.  I think every article that Microsoft has ever written which requires or suggests command-line management of services recommends the usage of the NET executable.  For those that may not be aware, or familiar, I want to introduce you to the SC executable and provide a comparison to the NET executable. For the most part, everything that NET does, SC can do.  The subtle differences... [More]

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]