Activate Windows and Office at the Command Line
I was recently looking for a way to activate Windows 7 and Office 2010 at a command prompt; this is what I found… Since the release of Vista, you can use the command line utility slmgr for Windows activation when using a MAK (or Multiple Activation Key). Windows Activation Open a command window (as administrator) And run… slmgr -ipk xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx slmgr [...]
(Not so) New Folder Locations
Since the advent of Windows Vista, the usual folder locations don’t always apply. Take the Quick Launch or All Users Desktop, where did they go? Here’s a short list of what’s been moved around (and yes, I’m writing this as much for me as anyone else)… All Users: All Users Desktop, Favorites, Documents, Downloads, Music, [...]
Time Skew and Exchange Services
On a recent Sunday night, I was home watching The Walking Dead, a colleague called to say that our core switch was down in our colo. As he was on vacation, I raced over there, preformed some troubleshooting, finally rebooting our huge Cisco 4510 to bring everything back online, that is except Exchange. The Exchange cluster [...]
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 [...]
PowerShell: Execution of scripts is disabled
This information is available on many sites, but I’m tired of searching for it every few months when I switch laptops/tablets. Whenever you try to run an unsigned PowerShell script, you get the following message: “File C:\Custom\Test.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-help about_signing” for [...]
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 [...]
User Profile Service service failed
While attempting to log onto an Windows Server 2008 R2 system with Exchange 2010 for the first time, I received the following error: “User Profile Service service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.” After much searching, we found that during a reinstall some bits were left in C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Exchange Server Once the files therein [...]
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