Windows 3-Tier Certificate Authority

Many months ago I was tasked with implementing a 3-tier Certificate Authority for a large Windows domain environment. Unfortunately there is surprisingly little information for the nitty-gritty questions one may have. The Microsoft Press book Windows Server® 2008 PKI and Certificate Security (this book seems to have been discontinued, thus outrageous pricing) proved quite useful, but [...]

AD Recycle Bin Tool

Last year Windows IT Pro magazine highlighted ADRecycleBin from Overall Solutions. It’s an excellent free utility to bring back deleted items (or reanimate for earlier Active Directory installations than 2008 R2). It’s a very nice alternative to the built-in feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 and is a drastic improvement over item recovery in earlier versions of [...]

Sysinternals

If you’re in IT working with Windows and haven’t heard of Sysinternals, you may want to check to see if you’ve been living under a rock. Sysinternals started as the community or free arm of Winternals, the money making portion of the company. Microsoft purchased Winternals back in 2006 for its IP and brain-trust. Mark [...]

Exchange Server Address List Service Failed

While creating a new user mailbox on an Exchange 2007 server a few moons ago, I received an error stating: “Exchange server address list service failed to respond“, obviously stopping my creation task in its tracks. This function is apparently one of the many that fall under the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant Service, once this [...]

MAPI32.DLL wrong version or corrupt

One of my clients recieved the error message “MAPI32.DLL wrong version or corrupt“ a few months ago, after trying Outlook 2007 and reverting back to Outlook 2003. The fix was simpler than expected… With Outlook closed, browse on over to C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033 and rename the MSMAPI32.DLL file. Open Outlook again and the MSMAPI32.DLL file will be replaced with [...]

WMIC to the Rescue

A recent project had me trying to script the retrieval of the Dell Service Tag. Luckily there’s WMI Command-line to the rescue. From a command line or in a script wmic bios get serialnumber will display or grab the Dell Service Tag. Furthermore, you can use the WMI Command-line to retrieve all kinds of system data and even make [...]

Outlook Links Don’t Work

One of my customers recently had an issue with broken links in all his Outlook e-mail. Any link that was present in the body or subject would not work, only giving the cryptic message: “This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer.” Turned out to be an issue with an [...]

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