It’s your first day on the job and you’re rearing to go. The previous administrator left two weeks ago so the servers have been running on their own with no administrative maintenance. Microsoft decides that today is also the day they are going to release a number of critical update patches to the Windows Server […]

If you’re already familiar with using Group Policy Objects in Active Directory environments, then you no doubt already know that GPOs can only be applied to 3 types of objects – sites, domains, and organizational units. You cannot apply a GPO to a user account object, nor to a security group.
While the rules are the […]

In the first article in this series, you learned about some of the key concepts and theories of virtual computing. With the basics now sorted, it’s time to get on to the fun part – working with virtualization software. In this article, we’re going to install one of the most popular options out there - […]

If you read technical magazines regularly, you’re bound to have seen at least one article about virtualization in the past six months. Virtual data centers, virtual disaster recovery facilities, virtual servers, virtual switches and virtual networks seem to have become almost omnipresent.
Even with the abundance of coverage that virtualization receives in the press it is […]

A Certificate Authority (CA) is an entity which is trusted to validate and certify the identities of others. In reality a CA is a company which maintains a software package that can manage the requests, issuance and revocation of certificate files. A CA is created by installing a certificate management software package such […]

In the first part of Shadow Copies of Shared Folders we learned what shadow copies are and how they can be enabled on a server volume. To recap, we have setup a drive that contains users’ redirected My Documents folders (E: in this example), have configured SCSF to make a shadow copy at 7:00 AM […]

In the Windows 2000 version of Active Directory, it was not possible to rename domains without demoting all domain controllers, which effectively destroyed the domain. In Windows Server 2003, domains can be renamed, as long as the forest in which they exist are configured to the Windows Server 2003 forest functional level. Of course, this […]

Although many people have already decided that Windows Server 2003 is no more than a minor revision of Windows 2000, the truth of the matter is that this new version includes more than just a few new features, tools, and services. Although it is built upon the foundation provided by Windows 2000, many of these […]

This article is the first in a series that will cover the design, implementation and management of a PKI. PKI systems have become more and more common in modern IT environments as more technologies are built to take advantage of the strong authentication provided by certificates.
What is a PKI?
A PKI is defined as “the […]

If you ask most network administrators what the top five tasks they perform on a repeated basis are, one task that is sure to be on the list is restoring a single file or a small number of files from backup (that and resetting passwords!). Users accidentally delete files, overwrite files, or may need an […]