Matias Nino's questions

We had a 2008 R2 domain controller begin failing recently, the backups all became corrupted and the system drive contained CRC errors. (thus preventing further backups).

We were able to promote a new domain controller with all the fsmo roles, but the sysvol/netlogon replication did not fully happen before the original domain controller failed into an unbootable mode.

Is it possible to recover the domain at this point? It seems the new domain controller contains all DNS and AD replications. Only thing it's missing is the SYSVOL and NETLOGON shares.

How would I go about manually removing all traces of the prior domain controller?

update According to Microsoft KB, there's a way to manually recreate the sysvol/netlogon shares. I think I may try that on the new DC. See what happens.

update2 Well, I managed to get the SYSVOL/NETLOGON shares up and running and the new DC seems to be running just fine. The old DC is unbootable. Now I have to figure how to decommission and remove the old DC without it being bootable.

I have been using Windows Server Backup on a Windows 2008 R2 server for quite a while now to create nightly bare metal backups to a network drive in case of drive failure. The nightly backup overwrites itself each night.

Unfortunately bad sectors began appearing on my system drive. This allowed the nightly backup to be created WITH bad sectors and thus destroying any possibility of restoration. It also overwrote the previous backup, thus making the whole backup process worthless!

Am I using WSB as it was intended to be used? How do I circumvent the potential for overwriting backups with a faulty one that cannot be restored?????

Is it possible to make a batch script that validates the integrity of a backup and then offloads it if true? What would such a script look like?

I recently installed the CAS role on an internal mail server in an attempt to move CAS to that server instead of an outward facing web server (which also happens to be the DC).

After installing CAS on the mail server, I removed CAS from the original server. However, all Outlook clients are STILL trying to connect to the previous server! For existing accounts, the Exchange server address is read-only and I cannot even change it to the new server name:

As you can see, I can't even change the address. I need to change it to the new server name, which on the client machine DNS is able to resolve FINE to the proper IP.

When I create a NEW account in outlook, I put in the new CAS server's address and upon clicking CHECK NAME, the server name field is automatically rewritten to the old CAS server!

I can put in the IP, NETBIOS, or DNS name of the internal CAS server and every time I CHECK NAME, the name gets automatically replaced with the old CAS server name (also the DC) and Outlook cannot connect.

Note: OWA works perfect to the new CAS server.

I'm at the end of my rope. The only ideas I have as to what this can be are: 1) Something in the AD name checking mechanism is forcing the client to use the old CAS address. No idea where I go to configure that.

2) A setting in Exchange needs to be set in order to make the new CAS server the default. But I already removed all references to the old CAS server in EMC and set the new CAS server address in all Client Access settings.

3) Could there be something in the 'Autodiscover' configuration that is screwing things up?

If I create a new AD domain user account. Does it, by default, have access to locally log on to any machine in the domain and read/write to its hard drive?

What are the default permissions for a new domain user in AD?

Is it possible to convert a VM from VMware to Hyper-V (or vice versa) and preserve the snapshots?

For example, I have a VM in VMWare workstation and I want to convert it to Hyper-V, but I want all the VMware snapshots to translate to Hyper-V snapshots when the VM is finally in Hyper-V.

If there is not any tool that currently does this, is this even theoretically possible?

Performance-wise, how much does the L3 cache size on Intel Xeon i7 processors matter for virtualization functions?

I'm picking out a Xeon 1366 Nehalem/Westmere CPU for a server I'm spec'ing to be a low end virtualization host for about 4-5 VM's.

There seems to be a price divide between 4MB L3 Cache and 8MB L3 Cache. How much performance would I get out of stepping up to 8MB vs 4MB?

I run an AD domain with Exchanage 2010 for a small business. The Exchange server is authoritative for several domains that I host for clients.

Some of these clients have many email addresses for their domains that they want forwarded various places. Right now I manage the mail contact forwards manually on a request basis. However, clients keep asking me if they can manage the mail contact fowards themselves.

Is there any web admin tool that would allow me to provision a very basic management interface so that a domain user can log in and create/edit mail contacts for their domain? If so, what is the best tool for the scope of the task?

Thanks!

We have enterprise users that want to try out an online mail provider (such as GMail or MS Exchange Online) for a trial period, but would also like their local mail (Lotus Notes) to remain synched with the trial account so that they can compare and contrast and maintain their normal work routine both in the cloud account and in their 'local' accounts.

What is the best way to achieve a seamless 'mirroring' of both email accounts for each user so that

• emails delivered to either account will appear in the inbox of both accounts
• emails sent from either account appear in on both accounts in the 'sent items' folder
• emails moved from one folder to another in one account will automatically reflect on the other account (this is a 'nice-to-have').

The key word here is seamless. Emails sent/delivered to/from either account should retain their original senders and sendees.

Is this even possible?

How would I configure IIS 7.0's ARR and URL Rewrite to reverse proxy based on a host.

For example:

http://website1.mydomain.com gets routed internally to internalserver\website1

http://website2.mydomain.com gets routed internally to internalserver2\website2

http://website3.mydomain.com gets routed internally to internalserver2 (default website)

FYI - The public DNS website1.mydomain.com and the rest are all actually pointing to the public IP of mydomain.com.

Note that this is not all the same server. There are multiple web servers INSIDE the firewall and one plain default web server whose port 80 and 443 are exposed to the outside. I have one IP Address and one domain name. Thus, since I have multiple web servers inside my firewall, I need to route hostname subdomains to different web servers on the inside.

Any detailed steps would help tremendously.

We have a critical production web server that can only be rebooted on early Sunday mornings.

Almost all critical security patches ask for a reboot after installing. I have a fear that a security vulnerability patch will come out on Tuesday and a zero day exploit will compromise the server before it gets a chance to reboot 5 days later.

Is the vulnerability removed after the install or after the reboot? Am I being overly paranoid? Is clustering the only way around this?

Is there any way to change the standard 20 character UserName maximum length restriction for local accounts?

(Server 2008 R2 to be specific)

I bought a plain ole SSL cert for mydomain.com. I also want to secure www.mydomain.com and mail.mydomain.com, which both map to the same server. Is this possible?

I'm trying to avoid having to buy a wildcard SSL as it costs $200 when all I really need is two subdomains.

Should the Active Directory PDC always be a physical machine or would it be okay to run it in a VM? What are the implications/trade offs/gotchas?

As a corollary to this, what about running a physical PDC that is also a Hyper-V host? Any implications there (especially for guest VM's that may also be SQL or Exchange Servers?)

Note: Performance implications are secondary. My main concern is gotchas.

I have had a pair of 5 year warranty WD Velociraptors hardware stripped on an intel ICH8R motherboard controller for about 1.5 years.

The other day, the volume randomly failed during no specific activity and the RAID bios indicated one of the drives had failed.

I did extensive diagnostics with Spinrite and WD Diag on each drive and they picked up NO surface issues, no sector errors, and no SMART warnings.

I then recreated the volume with the same drives, restored from backup, and have been up and running fine for 2 weeks now with no issues.

What happened?

Are my drives okay? Can there be something unhealthy with one of my drives that the diags are not picking up?

Say you have a production database and a staging database that you want to have replicate on a semi-hourly basis across the internet. The general intent is to have a stand-by backup, but also to have second read-only database for testing.

How would you go about setting that up and configuring it?

Any notes about performance implications are a plus.

(Answers regarding SQL SERVER 2005 or 2000 also welcome)

SQL Server creates its databases in the system program files directory structure.

I want to separate the database files away from the system partition.

Assuming the database is already created and populated: How do I move all files related to a database to a different location on a separate partition?

Having used drive imaging software for over a decade, I find it mind boggling that Virtual Machines can be snapshotted and restored in a matter of seconds, while drive imaging often takes hours.

I can snapshot a VM, reinstall to a different OS, then do a restore and somehow magically within seconds my old VM is back up perfectly in the state it was previously in.

How is this able to happen? What does the VM host actually do to the VM that makes this possible?

Say you have a public ASP.NET (or Classic ASP) application on IIS with a script/page that needs to write or update files in a specific folder that is located within the web publishing folder tree.

1) What is the proper way to set this up?

My main concern is that I want to let the ASP/ASP.NET apps write to a folder, but I don't want regular http users to be able to PUT files into it.

What is the best architecture for automating scheduled file synchronization / transfers for backup purposes in a windows server environment across either a LAN or the internet?

I would like to automate nightly (or perhaps hourly) file synchronization / backups as a windows service.

I have tried many of the commercial synch app solutions but I've had annoyances with every single one.

Short of coding my own VBS scripts to take care of this, anyone have any scenarios or software to recommend for a permanent solution to this ever-present problem?

If I only had 1 pair of 15,000 RPM SAS drives in RAID 0 to dedicate to a VM box, would it be best to

a) put the HOST OS on the raid drives and put the VM's on a single SATA 10,000 RPM drive

b) put the VM's on the raid drives and the OS on the SATA 10k drive.

c) Put both the OS and the VM's on the SAS RAID and forget about the SATA 10k.

If so, why?

Not asking for benchmarks here, just some logic of what would theoretically be best on a small-scale low-traffic VM box.