Starting a new job makes you ponder on which tools you use to get the job done, and which tools you have aquired over the years. I had to start with a white blanket again, and found out I have quite a large tookbox.
Awaiting my test environment for more technical articles, I’ll review my toolbox over the next few weeks, starting with the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack, or more commonly known as “adminpak.msi”.
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. …
A client uses Trend Micro Officescan 5.58. On Windows Server 2000, this works fine, but on Server 2003 it goes awry. Install does not pose any trouble, but after installation, there was no way for me to log into the Officescan’s control panel. The result was a 403 Forbidden: Access Denied error while calling up http://server/officescan/cgi/cgiChkMasterPwd.exe.
A day later, the client came up with the solution: switch on IIS 5.0 isolation mode in Windows Server 2003’s IIS 6.0:
[photopress:iis_50_isolationmode.gif,full,centered]
