Managing a large and distributed Exchange 2003 environment can be a challenging task for administrators, specifically when it comes to staying on top of critical maintenance - like ensuring that all your Exchange servers are being routinely backed up. Using the Exchange System Manager to check the status of each Mailbox Store for every Exchange server in a large environment quickly becomes a time consuming and tedious task that is prone to providing inaccurate results. Hopefully we all have competent Administrators who are local to the Exchange servers in our organization that we can rely on to ensure that each ...

There is a little known feature of Active Directory replication called "Change Notification" which enables an administrator to override the default lowest replication value of 15 minutes between two sites. By enabling Change Notification between two sites you can drop the replication between these two sites down to a schedule of every 15 seconds.Here's how it's done: 1: Launch ADSIedit.msc 2: Navigate to Configuration -CN=Configuration,DC=ForestRootDomainName --CN=Sites ---CN=Inter-Site Transports ----CN=IP 3: In the right hand pane, find the siteLink for which you would like to enable Change Notification, right click on it and select properties. 4: ...

After the installation of System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 RTM, you may notice the occurrence of several warnings in the Application event log on Agent-managed servers related to 32 bit ASP.Net performance counters, 64 bit ASP.Net performance counters, or both depending on the configuration of your system. The warnings are as follows: Event ID: 35 Source: WinMgmt Description: WMI ADAP was unable to load the ASP.NET_64_2.0.50727 performance library because it returned invalid data: 0x0 Event ID: 35 Source: WinMgmt Description: WMI ADAP was unable to load the ASP.NET_64 performance library because it returned invalid data: 0x0 Event ID: 40...

A guided walkthrough of how to deploy large numbers of virtual machines in VMWare ESX using PowerCLI.

Every Systems Administrator comes across issues from time to time that require either converting a SID to a friendly name or converting a friendly name to a SID. This can be useful in many troubleshooting or forensic activities, and there are numerous ways to approach this task. Fortunately, there are tools readily available within the Windows Server Support Tools suite as well as free tools that can help you accomplish this task; for the purposes of this demonstration we will cover two alternate methods. Method 1: Using ldp.exe from the Windows Server Support Tools suite Assuming you have the Windows Server 2000 or ...

Every Systems Administrator comes across issues from time to time that require either converting a SID to a friendly name or converting a friendly name to a SID. This can be useful in many troubleshooting or forensic activities, and there are numerous ways to approach this task. Fortunately, there are tools readily available within the Windows Server Support Tools suite as well as free tools that can help you accomplish this task; for the purposes of this demonstration we will cover two alternate methods. Method 1: Using ldp.exe from the Windows Server Support Tools suite Assuming you have the Windows Server 2000 or ...