Category: Blog

administrator

Top 10 Must Have Windows System Administrator Tools

Today I’m serving you the Top 10 Must Have Windows System Administrator Tools every system administrator should know about. Most of them are freeware but some are paid. Feel free to expand this list in the comments. Here we go in no particulair order. The good ‘ol sysinternals suite, every Windows admin knows about this excellent toolkit.

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testing

Create “Hidden” Active Directory Site for Application Testing Purposes

One of the biggest challenges in Active Directory Domain Controller upgrades are the application member servers, specifically the ones that make use of Active Directory authentication (Ldap). We all know the legacy applications within the organization, they’re still running after ten or more years, nobody knows something about it, there isn’t any documentation left but

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upgrade

Upgrading Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller to Windows Server 2012 R2

Recently I performed an in-place Windows Server 2012 domain controller upgrade to 2012 R2. An in-place upgrade will keep the existing documents and settings on the server. Windows Server 2012 R2 is considered an incremental upgrade as it adds features to the operating system rather than make major changes to the operating system. In this blog

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users

How To Get a List of Specified Users and Their Group Membership From Active Directory

Once in a while someone at your company asks you if you can deliver a list of users who are member of administration groups within your Active Directory environment. We want to restrict admin access to a minimum so it’s good to know who are the lucky ones and who are slipped through. 😉

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monitoring

How To Monitor LDAP, Kerberos and NTLM Traffic To Your Domain Controllers

Now with the extended support date for Windows Server 2003 in mind (14-07-2015) it’s good to look at how to finally get rid of those old domain controllers.  I came across a nice Technet article about how to monitor LDAP, kerberos and NTLM traffic to your domain controllers to find out which applications and servers

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Manually install patches on your standalone VMware ESXi 5.1 host

It’s relatively easy to install patches and updates on a standalone VMware ESXi 5.1 host. Get the update(s) from the VMware Patch Portal Upload the zip files to your datastore. Shutdown all of your virtual machines and put the host in maintenance mode. Connect to your host using an SSH client (make sure SSH is

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Slow performance MySQL on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8

After installing a MySQL/PHP combo  by using the Web Platform Installer on a Windows Server 2012 host with IIS 8 installed I noticed slow initial response time of loading webpages. I assumed it was PHP in need of some tweaking on the Windows platform but after running some performance tests the problem was not related

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