Windows Server

Enable remote desktop (RDP) connections for admins on Windows Server 2016

Windows Server 2016 has reached the General Availability (GA) milestone today. You can download it from your volume licensing site or MSDN. You can also create Azure VMs with Windows 2016. The latest and greatest Windows Server has many new Remote Desktop features. See What’s New in Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2016 for […]

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Microsoft responds to VMWare’s FUD

Much as I love blogging, I’m quite enjoying this unannounced break the past 3 weeks or so! A lot of interesting news, events (including TechEd 2009 in L.A.) and tidbits over the past weeks, and I’m sure you’ve kept up with it. (Incidentally, this also happened to be the first year in a long while […]

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Using Outlook’s Instant Search on Windows Server 2008

If you have Microsoft Outlook 2007 installed on Windows Server 2008 (perhaps because you’re also using a lab server as your workstation, or require Outlook for testing), when you start Outlook it complains about Windows Search service not being installed and that Outlook cannot provide fast search results when using the Instant Search feature. Figure […]

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ASN1 Bad Tag Error Installing an SSL Certificate in IIS 7

You’ve installed SSL certificates on previous versions of IIS more times than you care to remember. It’s no rocket science – you create a certificate request, request the certificate from a Certification Authority, get the certificate and complete your certificate request. Then there’s IIS 7. Modularized. Optimized. Secure. You follow the same procedure as you […]

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IIS 7 Authentication: What happened to the IUSR_MachineName account?

In previous versions of IIS, the IUSR_MachineName account is created for anonymous authentication. This is an actual user account created on the server (a domain account can be used in domain environments), and like all user accounts— it has a SID, and an account password with the accompanying management costs and risks. One of the […]

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Announced: Plug-in for Exchange backups on Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008’s new Windows Server Backup utility, the replacement for NTBackup, doesn’t do Exchange backups out of the box. I’m in Scott Schnoll’s session where he just announced a new Microsoft plug-in that will do Exchange VSS backups. The tool will be released this summer. More notes from this excellent session soon!

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Longhorn: Active Directory Users and Computers console saves trips to ADSIEdit

One of the nice features I noticed about the Active Directory Users & Computers (ADUC) console in Longhorn server – in an object’s properties, there’s an Attribute Editor tab built-in, that allows one to directly edit an object’s attributes. In previous versions, one had to use a tool like ADSIEdit to edit attributes not exposed […]

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‘Crapware’-free: Longhorn Server does not include useless desktop apps

We’ve been hearing a lot about ‘crapware‘ apps installed by hardware vendors on desktops and laptops – apps like AOL (or other ISP) software, myriad browser add-ins and toolbars, trial versions of anti-virus, firewall, and security software that you may never use – perhaps because your organization has standardized on some more manageable enterprise versions […]

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