In Windows Server 2000, and Server 2003 Active Directory, you were limited to one password Group Policy per domain. If you wanted a separate password policy for specific users or groups, you either had to create a custom filter, create another domain for those users, or buy 3rd party software. However, with Server 2008 Active [...]

I recently ran into a situation in which I needed and SSL certificate for a DC which did not have access to a Certificate Authority. In order to configure secure LDAP to authenticate against a DC, the domain controller must have a Domain Controller Authentication certificate configured for server authentication. Normally, you would simply set [...]

At work, we use a server monitoring system that is configured to monitor all Windows services configured to start automatically. Until now, this has proven extremely effective and has actually saved a lot of time and effort because we do not need to build a unique monitoring profile for every server. However, with some recent [...]

This afternoon I was getting ready to promote a Windows 2008 R2 server to be the second domain controller in a new domain when I started experiencing some really strange IP related issues. I had already configured TCP/IP settings properly, configured DNS to point to the existing domain controller, and properly tested name resolution. I [...]

I was checking whether or not one of my web servers was performing compression today due to some performance issues we were seeing, so I thought I would share what I found, which led me down the rabbit hole that follows…. If you want to increase the speed of your IIS Website, you may want [...]