Network Printer Offline

Yesterday I was at a client site where everyone prints directly to the printers, rather than sharing via a print server. One of the PCs kept showing a printer as offline, even though everyone else was printing to it. From the PC you could ping the printer and even browse to the builtin web server [...]

Deploying Your Own Root CA via Group Policy

Although it took some searching, this nugget was quite simple.
One of my clients has a Linux Certificate Authority and none of the Windows systems would give an invalid or unknown certificate authority error when visiting a company website that used a cert created by the CA.
Get your root certificate ready, then fire up the Group Policy [...]

Three Free Utilities

Everyone carries around a USB drive these days with a variety of utilities, these three have been very useful in the recent past.
CPU-Z – A great utility to find out what kind of memory is installed in a system. This is especially useful when a system is a plain box with out a service tag [...]

Internet Explorer 8 Released

Internet Explorer 8 was released today. I’m sure it’s already been downloaded a billion times already, but you can get it here.
My first impressions have been favorable. I’ve been using Slim Browser for quite some time, but it still uses the IE7 engine and the performance has been lackluster as of late. I’ve stuck with [...]

Only one DC?

Okay, maybe this is a soapbox item, but I’ve been to too many companies with only one domain controller.
Most of these companies have a full system backup running, but upon complete failure a restore will take a few hours minimum. One such outage and the cost of labor to pay an IT professional to restore [...]

Password Expiration Notifier

This is some really cool freeware (well, cool if you’re some kind of IT geek). Anyway, Redmond Magazine recently had a review of NetWrix Password Expiration Notifier. In a nutshell, it e-mails users when their Active Directory password is about to expire. This is huge for companies with remote users who only use webmail, local [...]

Lose the Shutdown Event Tracker

This tip has been around for a while, but I think it’s still worth sharing due to its possibly high annoyance factor.
On a production machine, I consider the Shutdown Event Tracker worthwhile, especially in environments with multiple administrators. When in a lab situation or testing environment, this prompt before shutdown gets old quickly. 
To change the [...]

Emergency Patch Today!

A critical flaw in Internet Explorer (some say Exploder) has been found and patched today.
This is a very critical update due to the fact your system can be affected by just visiting a website.
Go to Windows Update and patch your system!

Critical Windows Patch

This doesn’t happen often for Microsoft, a patch outside the usual second Tuesday routine. Apparently a Critical patch for the server service that affects earlier versions of Windows (2000/XP/Server 2003 (they don’t mention the expired NT4)) and an Important fix for the latest versions (Vista/ Server 2008) was needed for this vulnerability that they just couldn’t [...]