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 [...]

Free Windows Server 2008 R2 eBook

Well if this isn’t the week for free books… Now there is a free eBook download from Microsoft: Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2.
The “Introducing” series of MS Press books are hardly a technical treatise on whatever subject they happen to cover, but in my opinion, free information regarding their latest products is always a good thing.
And thanks [...]

Service ‘MSExchangeTransport’ failed

A few months ago I had an Exchange Server 2007 install stop cold, caughing up this error:
Error:
Service ‘MSExchangeTransport’ failed to reach  status ‘Running’ on this server.
Apparently if you disable IPv6 on a Windows Server 2008 the error will occur. Not to be picky, but how many networks are actually using IPv6 and why is it installed by [...]

Vista and Windows 2008 SP2 Now Available!

The latest service pack for the unified kernel was released yesterday. For the early adopters, get it here!
I’m installing it on my test system, but will be waiting a few weeks to deploy this on my work and home systems. I’d prefer to see what the tech sites and blogosphere have to say about possible [...]

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 [...]

Two More Free MS Press eBooks

MS Press is celebrating it’s 25th anniversary by giving away free stuff.
The books are Windows SBS 2008 Admin’s Companion and Visual Basic 2008 Express.
Follow the links at the MS Press blog site. (You have until April 22nd.)
As noted on the blog… the first MS Press book was in 1984, for Mac :)

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 [...]

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