The Windows Active Directory does not really have hard limits when it comes to group memberships. There are however soft limits.
Any ADSI or WMI query to a list of your group memberships will turn out to 1000 members in Windows 2000 mode, or 1500 in Windows 2003 native mode. Only by using ADO range limits, you can go by this soft limit.
This shouldn’t pose a problem when you are just adding members to an already big group. However, it does. …
Having version control is one of the sound practices of a good programmer. Version control can be done manually, but is quickly a very administrative and error-prone task, so many development organisations try to use automated systems, such as Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe or other applications. There are also open-source counterparts, such as the old and trusty CVS, or the newer Subversion.
What is interesting, however, is that many system administrators and architects do development too, but without any version control. A set of scripts is not as elaborate as an accounting application, but without proper versioning, even the best administrator risks losing track of changes, lost time on debugging. And many places do not offer any form of version control for system administrators!
In this post, I’ll explain how to run your own Subversion version control server to control your script development. This is an update to this post for Subversion 1.4.5 …
Last week, our team had a hard task solving an urgent problem on an VMWare ESX 3.0 we had running at one of our clients. For some unexplainable reason, the DHCP server running on one Microsoft Windows Server 2003 did not seem to work. On closer inspection, the service was still running on the server, but for some reason DHCP functionality was not reaching clients. …
Powershell is Microsoft’s answer of decent shell scripting on the Windows platform. Equipped with the functions you would expect from VBScript, it behaves as an Unix shell script would. All commands can work from the command line, or as a set of instructions in a file.
Adding to the basic shell functions one would expect, such as file and directory manipulation, reading and writing text files, manipulating strings with regular expressions, Powershell also integrates with .NET 2.0 and higher to communicate with other functions, such as accessing the System.Windows.Forms object to make neat forms equipped with all the controls you would expect in a compiled application, or in this case: manipulating Excel workbooks.
Using Excel together with PowerShell can be very easy. Too bad the documentation is sparse on this topic, and the official documentation makes no mention of a workaround that is needed when using Excel with PowerShell on a machine which is not configured with regional settings set to EN-us. …
One of many Microsoft patches used the Microsoft Update.exe Package Installer and that got me almost into trouble tonight…
The Update.exe Package Installer relies on Update.inf to check wheither the update, patch or hotfix is suited for the operating system and patch levels of your application. Normally, this poses no problem, but at times you might have something running which was supported, and then not. …
