Brian Desmond's Blog : Blog

EDUCAUSE 2009

Brian Desmond's Blog — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:32:00 GMT

I'll be at EDUCAUSE next week in Denver. Come say hello if you'll be there too - I'll be at Booth #565 Wednesday and Thursday all day. Read More......(read more)

Visiting Active Directory Users Group UK – October 29th

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 02:30:00 GMT

So if you're somewhere around London, I'll be speaking at the UK Active Directory Users Group. I've promised Mark Parris a deck on Active Directory Design topics, plus we'll talk about whatever else comes up. Details available here - http...(read more)

How to Sysprep in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:42:00 GMT

About eighteen months ago, I blogged about how to run Sysprep for Windows Server 2008 and this has turned out to be the most popular article on this site by a long shot, so I figured I'd update it for Windows Server 2008 R2 (and Windows 7). If you...(read more)

BlackBerry Administration Service Error

Brian Desmond's Blog — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:25:00 GMT

If you get a "The request could not be completed" each time you access the BlackBerry Administration Service component in the BES5 administration website, make sure your service account password is not greater than 32 characters in length. Mine...(read more)

TEC EMEA 2009

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:09:00 GMT

I'll be presenting at TEC again at their EMEA show in Berlin in about a week. Hope to see you there. Read More......(read more)

Looking for Rogue User Objects in Active Directory

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT

I had this problem I needed to solve earlier today which involved going through about 115,000 users and determining which ones existed in the source of record (some tables in an Oracle database). There's a bunch of ways to go about this, but, I settled...(read more)

Baseline Registry Settings for new Domain Controllers

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:15:00 GMT

I have a list of baseline registry settings which I put on any new domain controller. I thought I'd share the VB Script below which sets all these as well as enables some performance counters. Many of the settings are applicable outside of a Domain...(read more)

McAfee EPO Agent Deployment Logs

Brian Desmond's Blog — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:34:00 GMT

When McAfee EPO fails to push an agent out, the only information you get is that the task "Failed". This isn't really useful at all of course. Thus the trick is to go on your EPO server in %ProgramFiles%\McAfee\ePolicy Orchestrator\db\Logs...(read more)

DPM June Rollup

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:46:00 GMT

FYI if you use Data Protection Manager (DPM), the predictably regular rollup for June is up, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970867 . This gets you to 2.0.8844. The bits are available without a call to PSS if you haven't got Premier portal access...(read more)

McAfee Troubleshooting Tip - CmdAgent

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:09:00 GMT

If you're trying to troubleshoot McAfee EPO agents, there's a handy tool I recently discovered with the help of a friend. If you go in %ProgramFiles%\McAfee\Common Framework, launch cmdagent /s. You'll get the handy UI pictured below. With...(read more)

McAfee and SMTP Traffic

Brian Desmond's Blog — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:07:00 GMT

I've been chasing after an issue with a new Exchange deployment not sending any outbound mail. When you telnet to port 25 on any SMTP server it just fails straight away as if there's a firewall or something in between. I finally got a network...(read more)

Windows 2008 Schema Update - INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS

Brian Desmond's Blog — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:20:00 GMT

If you're trying to import an LDIF file with some schema changes on a Windows Server 2008 (or Vista) machine and it bails with an access denied error and an INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS messag, first make sure your account is in the Schema Admins group. Second...(read more)

Windows Firewall Rules for Data Protection Manager

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:24:00 GMT

I've had the pleasure of trying to reverse engineer the firewall requirements DPM has since they've declined to document any of this in a useful fashion. My experience so far is that this product does something very slick with Exchange and brings...(read more)

Editing Group Policies without ADUC or GPMC

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 09:21:00 GMT

Under Windows Server 2003 (and 2000), Active Directory Users and Computers was always available by just launching dsa.msc. From there you could use the legacy Group Policy management interface if you didn't have the GPMC loaded. Windows Server 2008...(read more)

Upgrading Anti-Virus Rules for Windows Server 2008 Domain Controllers

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:50:00 GMT

KB article 822158 does a good job covering all of the antivirus exclusions for Windows machines as well as for domain controllers in particular. If you're upgrading domain controllers to Windows Server 2008 or better, be sure to update your anti-virus...(read more)

McAfee EPO Setup SQL Failure

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:11:00 GMT

If you're trying to install McAfee EPO (ePolicy Orchestrator) 4.0 and setup is failing when it tries to connect to your SQL Server with a variety of worthless errors, be sure that the server name you specify matches the result of this SQL query exactly...(read more)

Exchange Databases Fail to Mount with 0x97E

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:01:00 GMT

If you run into a scenario where your Exchange databases are failing to mount with either of these errors, first reference this Technet article . Assuming that doesn't apply then manually start the System Attendant (MSExchangeSA) service on the machine...(read more)

Resuming a Failed Exchange 2007 Setup

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:04:00 GMT

If you've ever had Exchange 2007 setup fail partially, you've probably noticed that some of the components (maybe even the one it failed during) show up as installed, but, if you run the ExBPA (Best Practices Analyzer), it will probably complain...(read more)

VMWare Workstation – Guest Window Sizing

Brian Desmond's Blog — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:10:00 GMT

I recently discovered that VMWare Workstation has a couple of options on the View menu which will dynamically adjust the screen resolution of a guest to match the window on the host. If you've ever had a window looking like this and have tried to...(read more)

TechEd 2009 LA – I’ll Be There

Brian Desmond's Blog — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:39:00 GMT

Coming to TechEd in a couple weeks? Come say Hello! I'll be hanging out at the MS Active Directory booth in the Technical Learning Center all week answering questions and talking to customers. I'll be at the booth for sure in the afternoon every...(read more)