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One of my colleagues reported an issue at a customer this past weekend where every time he transferred FSMO roles, MOM would report that the MS DTC (distribution transaction coordinator) service had terminated unexpectedly on all the domain controllers in a domain at this customer. At this particular customer that bought us about 350 emails from ...

So I'm working on a project which involves some documentation around disaster recovery and I flagged a word in the text for the technical reviewers to suggest a better word (BCD40). The feedback I got really made me laugh: Share this post: email it! | digg it! | bookmark it! | live it!

I was complaining (more or less) several weeks ago about the amount of work it was going to take to upgrade my MCSE to the latest version. The good news is I went and did the Windows end of things and now I'm apparently an ''MCITP: Enterprise Administrator''. Now compared to MCSE, no HR person is going to know what that means. Most folks are ...

I'll be down in Orlando at TechEd IT Pro next week. I'm working a booth of some fashion in the Technical Learning Center most of the week I'm told, so feel free to drop in and say hello if you're in town as well. Share this post: email it! | digg it! | bookmark it! | live it!

The Microsoft error code lookup tool (which no Windows admin should be without) got updated today: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=be596899-7bb8-4208-b7fc-09e02a13696c&displaylang=en&tm. While it says it's for Exchange, it really covers Exchange, Windows and a number of other Microsoft products. You can plug an ...

I came across these shortcuts today for navigating the group policy editor and thought they'd be worth sharing. They're holdovers from Windows Explorer that also work in the GPO editor. If you press * while targeting a folder in the console, the folder and all of its' children will be expanded If you press + while targeting a folder in the ...

Thought I'd post an informational post for folks who are moving an AD forest to Windows 2003 forest functional level (aka FFL2) as I realized today this piece of information might not be quite as well known as I might have thought. As an FYI, this change adds a number of attributes to the partial attribute set (aka the PAS or global ...

I'm heading downtown in a bit for DEC 2008 and will be around all week. Please do say stop by and say hello and join in the conversations if you're there! If you're looking for suggestions on local things I can try and help since I'm from Chicago too. Share this post: email it! | digg it! | bookmark it! | live it!

There are a few things that you really have to consider when you're setting up your site links – the naming convention, cost relative to the underlying WAN transport, frequency of replication, and schedule (that is when replication can even occur). Naming your site links is something you've got to think about what they're all going to look like ...

I thought I'd share the script attached at the end of this post as it's something I've seen requests for below. The script will take all of the users in a given OU (or really any subtree), and create a home folder for them and stamp the path and drive letter on the user object in Active Directory. By default it only grants the users modify ...