Note:This article is a follow up to Planning a DFS Architecture Part One and Part Two. Although Windows Server 2008 improves upon DFS technology, DFS has been around for quite a while, and I have learned quite a bit over the years about planning for DFS replication. I’m not talking about the replication topology itself,…
In the previous article in this series, I explained why I believe that performance monitoring is becoming more important now than it ever has been before. I also showed you a quick trick for getting an idea of how your system’s resources are currently being used. In this article, I want to continue the discussion…
Disk quotas were originally introduced in Windows 2000, but have improved in each subsequent version of Windows. Of course these constant improvements mean that the way that this quotas are implemented have changed from one version of Windows to the next. In this article, I will show you how disk quota management works in Windows…
A Server Core installation provides a minimal environment for running specific server roles, which reduces the maintenance and management requirements and the attack surface for those server roles. In Windows Server 2008, Server Core installation does not include the traditional full graphical user interface (GUI). Therefore, once you have configured the server, you can only…
As described in my previous articles, Windows Server 2008 has an interesting option to install it with a minimal graphical user interface (or GUI for short). This method of installation is called “Server Core”, and it allows an administrator to only install the minimum binaries required to run a specific server role (currently, there are…
Virtual Machine Additions are a very important component of Virtual Server 2005 (and Virtual PC 2007). Running VM Additions on a VM is not a must, but you’d better do it as soon as possible, even as the first thing to do right after finishing the installation phase of the OS itself. Note: if for…
Server Message Blocks Protocol (SMB) is the file sharing protocol used by default on Windows-based computers. SMB 1.0 was designed for early Windows network operating systems such as Microsoft LAN Manager and Windows for Workgroups, but until Windows Server 2008 and Vista, all Microsoft-based operating systems continued to use it more or less in its…
If you have ever done much work with group policies, then you have undoubtedly found out that managing group policies are an organization wide basis can be a complicated endeavor. That’s primarily due to the hierarchical nature of group policies. Group policy settings can be applied at the OU, site, domain, and local computer levels….
As we all know, DHCP Servers are used to assign IP Addresses and other configuration information to client computers running almost any sort of operating system, ranging from regular desktop computers, through laptop computers, up to thin clients and mobile devices. All these require a DHCP server in order to get their TCP/IP configuration settings…
Microsoft operating systems, starting from Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and now Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, have always had a built-in method of extending or expanding a partition that was configured on the computer’s physical hard disks. While shrinking partitions was not possible internally, and usually required usage of 3rd-Party tools,…