They say that knowledge is power, therefore the more knowledge you have over your server farm you have the more powerful you are as an administrator. Correct? Well I think so anyway!

We all know there are loads of tools out there for monitoring your Windows Server environment. I’ve used several of these tools including the likes of server monitor professional, gfi server monitor, activeXperts, serverwatch and even configuring MRTG graphs to report performance stats from perfmon log files. Today I stumbled across a piece of monitoring software that is really easy to use, cheap, quick to configure and is overall a really decent bit of software. The software is called Server Monitor Pro and was created by a company called Power Admin (PA).

How many times have you had users call you up complaining that they cannot launch a Citrix session because they already have 1 running, yet they swear blind they closed it correctly? Speaking for myself it happens all the time!

More often than not the reason for this behaviour is because the application which the user was using calls another application which does not close correctly when the published application is running causing the session to remain active.

Citrix published the resolution to this in a kb article some time back, here it is.

Decommissioning domain controllers is never an enjoyable task, even more so when the domain controller holds any of the 5 FSMO roles. The guide below can be used when performing these tasks.

Transferring FSMO roles can be done using 2 methods. First and in my opinion the simplest is by using the various MMC snap-ins available to an administrator. Second is by using the NTDSUTIL.exe command. NTDSUTIL is a little more complex, especially if you dont know the commands off hand, however I have provided these below.

In order to modify the Schema master role remember you need to be a member of the schema admins group and to modify the domain naming master you need to be a member of enterprise admins. All other roles can be transferred using a domain Admin account.

Note that modifying these roles could cause your Active directory infrastructure to fail. Datacrash.net nor any of their member can be held accountable for failures resulting from these actions.

What or who is consuming all that diskspace?

This is a commenly asked question if there is no spaceguard or quotamanager installed on a server hosting shares for groups or users.

Hello All,

I thought let's post a bit on my personal behalve. Sitting for the first time this week behind my privat computer with a bottle of beer I am wondering how we (the datacrash.net team) can push this website to the next level.

Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Beta 2 is now available in beta for MSDN and Technet Plus subscribers, with a lot of improvements for the mobile devices. Look a the following list for a short overview:

• New Policies – A ton of new policies
• Bandwidth reductions – Less round trips and less data transferred.
• S/MIME support – S/MIME has been added and has backward support for WM 5 + MSFP.
• Sync State Upgrade for Migrations – Allows users to maintain their setting while their mailbox is transitioned from Exchange 2K3 to Exchange 2K7 (no need to re-sync to the new server).
• Default Policy Support – A default policy can now be set so administrators don't have to apply the policy to each user or write a script to iterate though users.
• Cancel Remote Wipe – Canceling remote device memory/storage wipes is available in OWA and though Exchange Management Console.

Check out a full list of the new features included in SP1 Beta 2, details.