I have seen some vendors saying this lately. It’s a bunch of crap. It’s a sales gimmick that in my humble opinion has no technical merit whatsoever.

So the pitch goes like this, why stub? You can just archive the data and the user still has access to their email on or offline with no third party intervention! You don’t have to train anyone and you can still search the email system and restore deleted emails. Read the rest of this entry »

New press release for www.arconi.com. Just did a new press release to cover some of the changes at my primary site.

San Jose, CA ( PRWEB) November 9, 2009 - Arconi SoftTools Gives Powerful Microsoft Active Directory and Windows Server Utilities Away for Free… http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/11/prweb3174114.htm

So I’ve been working hard to get all of the tools updated. I have re-released many of them already. I worked on the most popular ones first:

• RDP Enable (remote desktop enable) http://www.arconi.com/rdpenable
• Active Directory Reporter http://www.arconi.com/utilities/active-directory-utils/adattributereporter.html
• Active Directory Editor http://www.arconi.com/utilities/active-directory-utils/activedirectoryeditor.html

I’ve added some new features that I was already wanting myself and some that users have requested. Read the rest of this entry »

So after much testing and consideration I decided to update the website. It’s very important to me to keep things as close to “cutting edge” as possible. Maybe you don’t know but this website is run with a content management system known as  Joomla.

Joomla allows for quick sweeping changes to an entire site without coding (or very little of it any way). It also gives the ability to maintain users account and control access to different parts of the site. But that’s the tip of the iceberg there is a whole lot more… Here is a quote from the Joomla.org site: Read the rest of this entry »

So I posted this one at my website as well but I have a new hitch with  it- Got a customer thats writing thier “vault” to a permabit. Could not get the savesets to process (process shortcuts). Went to the location that the “IgnoreArchiveBitTrigger.txt” was being created and found that it had a created date of december 1st, 1969. So that makes sense?  Tried creating  by hand and got the same results. So I modified my VB script to overwrite the varible that I was creating with

Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(Apath)

With the “objFile” varible I was adding a letter to tghe end to create a new varible each time, instead I just left it alone so it reused the varible and now it works, the file has the correct date and time? Still cant create it by hand though?

So my customer is waituing for a call from permabit with an explanation or fix for the issue. I’ll update when I find out.

OK so I constantly am setting this up for customers, the IgnoreArchiveBit.txt

The basic steps are as follows:

Read the rest of this entry »

So I performed a domain rename recently using Microsoft’s “Domain Rename Tools”.

I was building a lab domain that needed to be an exact copy of my production AD (active directory). But as the lab runs its own network on a separate Internet connection and is less secure than the production network, I didn’t want the “real” domain name available for hackers. In other words if the lab domain got hacked and the AD security info was compromised at least they wouldn’t have the production network name to search for. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok so your company is merging with another one and you have just been assigned the task of merging the computing infrastructures. So where do you start?

First clarify the scope of your ”infrastructure merge” Read the rest of this entry »

All systems administrators at one point in their career will more than likely have to perform a migration. It may be due to a merger of their company and another, a buy out or a purchase of another company. Hopefully you’ll keep your job but either way it’s great experience.

So I have been through many of these and with a lot of success so I want to share that experience with you as I know information about this process can be hard to come by. I’m going to break it up into several articles or “phases” that you will help guide you towards a successful migration. I’m going to include the tools you’ll need and where to get them. As well I’ll give the instructions on how to use them.

So stay tuned for the first article “ Domain Migrations – First Steps” I should have it posted in a few days.

I have several tools that I have written to aid in the management of Active Directory. I use these really frequently and so do a lot of my co-workers and friends. Some are more usefull than others. This one is very useful and that’s why I’m giving it it’s own entry.

This one is called AD Attrib Change, I know not a very “cool” name but all I really care about is what it does.

In it’s current state it will update the bussiness phone, cell phone, department and location fields in AD for a user account. It will perform this on as many accounts as you throw at it. I recently ran it on a list of about 1500 users and it updated all of them without a hitch.

Read the rest of this entry »

This KB article title is a little deceiving because there are several other instances where this multiple CNAME problem occurs.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281308
Microsoft says:

“When a client computer connects to a Microsoft Windows 2000-based computer or a Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based computer by using an alias name, the client may receive the following error message: Read the rest of this entry »