The ramblings of a computer geek
Sometimes the interactive logon message that you can apply to machines via GPO can get in the way. But you may not want to disable it for everyone just an OU, in which case configure this against a low down OU (i.e. one nearest the computer object) that will get precedence. GPO Computer Configuration Policies … Read more
A Windows XP machine doesn’t apply computer GPO on boot, all seems to be well and the GPOs can be run once logged on and all appear to be okay. You just don’t get the software installation happening or any scripts running on boot. Strangely if you set the machine to use a static IP … Read more
After a power cut one of our Windows 2008 R2 VMs was dead, even though it was cleanly shutdown by the UPS something must have happened and it would not boot. When booting the VM it would just boot straight into the Windows Recovery tool, this was not good news. Running any commands against the … Read more
I was getting the errors of “The Certificate is Invalid for Exchange Server Usage” to “The certificate status could not be determined because the revocation check failed.” Here is how I fixed them in our test environment before we deployed to live, the first error is a common one, the second one seems to only … Read more
Upon setting up a “send as” permission a mailbox for a user I got stuck. Even though the permissions on the user object were correctly setup for “Send As” when trying to send as a user with Outlook 2010 I kept on getting an error message. After double and triple checking the permissions I concluded … Read more
Upon the setup of the new Windows 2008 R2 DNS servers there is a problem that the DNS lookups for external domain fail; internal domain name resolution is unaffected. Restarting the DNS server (or the whole server) resolve the problem, as does clearing the cache. When the problem is happening, an nslookup command issued for … Read more
When depromoting a domain controller I started to get this error: “The operation failed because Active Directory could not configure the computer account <COMPUTERNAME>$, on the remote domain controller <COMPUTERNAME>$ “Access is denied.” What I did to try and fix it: · Verified the “protect from accidental deletion” tick box not … Read more
I kept getting this bloody ‘440 Authentication Timeout’ page in IE. And I would get it instantly, so there was no way it was actually timing out. A quick google on this error returned a half dozen pages of threads, with no resolutions. As a result, I figured I’d better blog this for future reference … Read more
I had some amusement when someone tried sending a 1MB email to 400 people and the server was set for direct delivery. It flattened out the ADSL and caused lots of problems, first job was to click the “disable outbound mail” button in the Exchange System Manager under queues. Then temporarily close port 25 on … Read more
Recently I had the joy of an oversize (16GB) exchange database that would not mount, I needed to do a emergency defrag of it and hes what I did. 1. First shutdown Exchange completely, including the information store service, to ensure we get a clean shutdown. 2. Now copy the files priv1.edb and priv1.stm files … Read more