joeware - never stop exploring...

There is an article on TechNet about the forest’s tombstone lifetime for Active Directory (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc784932(WS.10).aspx) that was discussed on an internal MSFT DS Team / MSFT MVP email list. The discussion pointed out that there is a little confusion around the article.
Specifically the confusion can come up around step 8
Note the value in the Value [...]

I have posted what I expect to be the final AdFind and AdMod beta before final release.
http://www.joeware.net/downloads/beta/adfindmod_beta.zip
 
I am shooting for a mid-February release.
 
In the last 10 days most of the updates are in AdFind. Lots of misc shortcut bug fixes. Added some additional attribute decodes. One big item is that I added digest [...]

Just don’t do it.
See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424329(WS.10).aspx
From the article
When a company acquires another company, business unit, or product line, the purchasing company may also want to acquire corresponding IT assets from the seller. Specifically, the buyer may want to acquire some or all of the domain controllers that host the user accounts, computer accounts, or security [...]

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/187009/financial_firm_notifies_12m_after_password_mistake.html
A Concord, New Hampshire, financial services company is sending data breach notification letters to customers after discovering that shared passwords, set up to simplify administrative functions nearly 10 years ago, could have exposed the private data of 1.2 million customers.

Off the top of my head, every company I have ever seen does this in some [...]

I promise myself that any time I hit about five emails for the same issue, I will try to write a blog entry about it so people can find it during their Google search phase before attempting to bother the developers/support folks…
Well I hit the limit this morning with an issue that has annoyed [...]

I have updated the AdMod Beta again. My good friend Princess (Jorge) was very nice to ping me with an issue he was hitting in AdMod (both previous stable versions and beta) this last week and low and behold after testing I realized it was a bug. A bug in a very nasty portion of [...]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=a45059af-47a8-4c96-afe3-93dab7b5b658
 
The same for Windows Vista is on the horizon…

I incorrectly linked AdMod when I posted it (http://blog.joeware.net/2010/01/07/1862/) previously. So if you ran it you probably saw an error about a missing DLL unless you had already installed the Borland/Codegear DLLs for some other app. I have recompiled and relinked with static linkages so everyone should be fine now. Let me know if there [...]

“Better authentication methods can come along any day now… I’m ready…”
That is something I said this morning while working on my work laptop. We recently were required to add whole machine encryption which meant adding yet another password and remembering yet another ID/Password combination. When I loaded the encryption software two things irked me… The [...]

Wow, I got quite a few emails on the Special Folder GUIDs posts… Thanks to all who sent me the link… Keep it up!
Here are the link everyone was sending me
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee330741(VS.85).aspx
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10426627-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

After seeing http://blog.joeware.net/2010/01/07/1860/ my good friend Deano reminded me that he had shown me something like this back last year for just Network Connections…
md c:\_special\nc.{7007ACC7-3202-11D1-AAD2-00805FC1270E}

Looks like…

http://www.wired.com/video/ces-2010-hands-on-with-transparent-display-of-the-future/60826805001

No new info here… Just revisiting my previous post about the recorder that lets you record what you are doing for documentation or debugging. I keep forgetting the command and so wanted to post here so I can find it easier without having to worry that the original poster’s post goes away…
So joe, when you [...]

Mark Minasi has an interesting newsletter this month about a special folder that you can create to see all your CPL’s in one place. Very nice… You can read about it here –> http://www.minasi.com/newsletters/nws1001.htm
Basically I ran the following command
md c:\_special\cp.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

And then just pull the folder up in Explorer…
explorer c:\_special\cp.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

That will save a lot of time [...]

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/2/3/823871D1-819F-446D-ADD5-3049B78F020F/Windows_Server_2008_R2_Feature_Components.pdf

I have been exceedingly lax in updating AdMod this last year. I started working on it on and off after releasing AdFind V01.40.00 last year and while I have gotten much in, I haven’t gotten it released. In the meanwhile, I would hit little things that needed to be fixed in AdFind so I started [...]

Someone asked me a question at work today about PowerShell… yes, I know, silly silly people but I was a bit curious as well so I opened up the PSompt (hmmm PSPrompt… Command PS… P Prompt… PS Prompt… ) err whatever… I opened the Windows application that gives me an interactive PowerShell instance and typed [...]

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/C/0/5C0BD0AB-040D-4C56-A60B-661001012DDA/Windows_Server_2008_R2_e-book.pdf

Convert your system into a virtual…
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

This looks pretty cool, XP Mode virtualization without the dreaded hardware virtualization support requirement…
I poked around the web site, couldn’t tell what their business model is supposed to be. Do they intend to just give this away?
http://www.vmlite.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/18/windows_7_heart/
I found this to be an interesting article. I was really interested in the part about Heap Shimming via Fault Tolerant Heap (FTH). Of course my first thought was cool, how do you get a list of apps that this is being applied to. Up until today I had only found a command to clear [...]

A friend sent this link to me… Could be useful if you are doing web dev work…
http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

I regularly get asked about people adding CNAMEs to DNS to set up an alias for a Windows machine. Like maybe the machine name is server123site5 and they want to call it oldserver1. They do that and all of a sudden when they try to use it the connection attempt results in a “duplicate name [...]

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357079,00.asp
 
I haven’t tried this but think I will start recommending it to any and everyone that says their PC is taking forever to start up. Every time I look at those machines they tend to have a bazillion apps that start on logon.

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html

This is pretty cool looking
 
http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=4
 
Gizmo Drive v2.7.6
      •    Mount ISO, BIN, CUE, NRG files to a virtual CD-ROM drive       •    Mount VHD files, used with Microsoft Virtual PC       •    Mount password protected images to a virtual hard drive       •    Encrypt [...]

If you want to test out Office 2010 you can get it at http://office.com/beta. I have been using the Customer Preview of O2010 for some time now and really like it for the most part. Still trying to find where certain things got moved to but getting better and better with it. Overall I found [...]

Wireshark 1.2.4 became available, it runs fine on Windows 7 x64 that I have seen and didn’t require any special install like the x64 1.2.2 required.