joeware - never stop exploring...

In my last post I was bemoaning forgetting a password validation API call. As I was sitting around watching my tropical fish tank and relaxing from the long hard week I finally remembered the API call. For future refererence for myself and for anyone who thought, hey that sounds like a cool function, I am [...]

What do you do to store the knowledge you have gathered? How do you have it setup for effective storage and retrieval? Does it work?
Yesterday I was going through some newsgroups and ran across an item that I knew the answer to but I will be darned if I could find the API call again [...]

Still no blog posts from Brett.
~Eric has another humorous writeup concerning this spellbinding tale of the complete lack of the written word (excluding categories of course) and the man and the ideas behind the man it takes to accomplish it in such a spectacular fashion.
I am starting to believe that when, but mostly [...]

There is a common misconception that GUIDs[1] are guaranteed to be unique. The misconception is probably because GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier or people are misunderstanding the concept of being “mathematically guaranteed” unique.
If you look at the documentation for one of the higher MS API function that creates GUIDs – CoCreateGuid you will find [...]

Here I am just working away on Active Directory Third Edition with the Media Center playing recorded Will and Grace or Yes Dear! episodes in the background and I am sweating over some of the changes.
I mean some changes are easy, things that are wrong and it is a simple matter to correct the info [...]

I added a couple of features to FindExpAcc to help folks out using it in scripts to send messages to people about upcoming expirations…
The first change is a new column in the CSV output called expireDays. This field is the number of days until expiration. If it has a negative value, it means the account [...]

So I don’t let myself go lax on updating this blog, I am forcing myself to step out here and say something occasionally, even if the audience for the message could be extremely limited.
I finally have the contract from O’Reilly for Active Directory Third Edition and while there was a little confusion around the timeline, [...]

Cool update to the previous post on the Windows Server 2003 SP1 SCM ACL Issue.
Microsoft actually does have some functionality in SC to handle viewing/manipulating the SCM ACL. Cheer!!!
It isn’t something that you can see in the help from SC, but Steve Patrick under his tech4steve@comcast.net address posted a link to a blog entry on [...]

It is muggy and nasty outside so I don’t want to play in the yard. Especially since I did a lot of yard work yesterday and got pretty crispy fried.
I don’t feel like doing some tile work I need to do in the house.
So I am sitting here in a nice air conditioned room looking [...]

There is a fairly cool update in Windows Server 2003 SP1 that is currently biting folks.
In SP1 Microsoft took the ACL that always existed on the Service Control Manager and made it useful. They made it so you can now modify that ACL to control who can access the SCM, previously you could enumerate the [...]

SvcUtil has been updated to work with Windows Server 2003 SP1 to allow someone who has been delegated rights to a specific service to work with that service even if they aren’t logged on locally to the machine or an administrator on the machine.

It was brought to my attention that the version of GCCHK that is downloaded from the website was V01.01.00 instead of the V01.03.00 that is specified in the web page. The actual download file got revved back at some point, it is now corrected.
If you use this tool, please verify the version.

I have received the DOC files for Active Directory 2nd Edition so I can start working on making it Active Directory 3rd Edition.
I am not afraid to say that I have butterflies over it. This is pretty different. As you may know, I wrote a chapter for the Windows Server Cookbook but this [...]

Ok, so I am working on the event message id tool dumper I discussed previously and I run into something very odd.
First off the tool, it is progressing nicely, output is considerably cleaned up by filtering out categories, etc and writing headers to the files, etc.
So I start spot checking the output to double [...]

So, I am working on this little app to dump all event log ID messages on a specific machine. MS used to offer a database with this info but I can’t seem to find anything newer than the NT4 version. They now have a nice website at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/eventserrors.mspx
which is quite nice, however, if you are working [...]

I corrected a bug in AdMod with undeleting objects. New version is V01.06.00.
A change with how DNs were handled in V01.05.00 caused an issue with the undelete process that I should have caught in testing but didn’t. Luckily Jorge ran into the bug and emailed me about it and I was able to correct it [...]

I had an interesting experience today.
On a regular basis I receive probably about 50-200 emails a week of questions and comments and requests from people. Some of them are rather interesting, some are downright insane. Some time I will write about the guy who wrote me about how I needed to remove my opening [...]

So anyone using the HP OVOW ADSPI? What do you think of it? What is good? What is bad? I am trying to learn about it and am currently in a unique position to give feedback to key HP people about it.
Email me or post comments here…
joe