Richard West's questions

We are running in a Windows 2008 / Windows 7 environment.

One on my users is being locked out of his Active Directory account on a daily basis. This occurs between 10 and 18 hours after each reset.

This just started last week.

I can see that the reason for the lockout is a failed number of password attempts. However, the user is not failing any attempts when he unlocks his system.

Therefore I am thinking that there must be a service, or some application, that has held on to his credentials (possible old?) and is trying to access the network in someway thus triggering the lockout event.

Are there any tools that I can use to tell me what computer these failed logins are coming from? Is there anything you can recommend to further troubleshoot this issue? It has become very frustrating.

Thanks!

We are writting a custom windows service application. The service is set to allow interaction with the desktop, and the service application will need to execute another "normal" application. The service is setup to start and run with a normal windows user account, not the system account.

The problem that we are having is that when the service calls the other normal application it appears that the registry is not being loaded as it is when the user account that the service is running as logs into windows. Specifically the application is throwing an error that certain registry keys are unavailable.

Why is the account that is running the service not receiving the full registry that the same user accounts receives when it logs into the same windows system? Can anything be done to change this?

I was watching a video on Cisco's new data center in Allen Texas and at the 7:15 mark they show some interesting cabel labels - photo attached.

Can anyone help identify where I can purchase these labels, and the printer necessary to print them?

I'm getting used to Server Core and I know at some point I am going to type "Exit" in the command window while connected through a remote desktop session.

I know that if this is done while connected to the local console, you can press Ctl-Alt-Del to bring up the Task Manager and select New Task and run CMD.EXE to get the Command Window back.

However, you can't press CTRL-ALT-DEL in an RDP session.

So before I make this mistake I thought I would find out what happens and how I go about getting a Command Window back.

Thanks!

In Windows 7 and Windows 2008 is appears that Microsoft changed how users would be reminded about upcoming password expirations.

In Windows XP the password expiration was very obvious. There was a password change request screen that was displayed after the user logged in asking if they wanted to change their password because it will expire in X number of days.

However in Windows 7/2008 this was changed. Now the user is logged in normally with a small notification bubble that appears for a few seconds in the lower right hand corner of the users screen suggesting that they change their password.

I am looking for a way to go back to the Windows XP type of method, or at least something that is more obvious to the user that they need to change their password. Is there an AD setting, or something else that I can do, to enable the functionality on my users systems?

I have a Windows 2008 server - 32bit - running in an ESX environment.

I can manually sync the time to a time server (time.microsoft.com, tick.gatech.edu, or any other time server) and the time is properly set and displayed in the system tray clock. I am also setting the time zone correctly to Eastern Time - Adjusted for DST.

Everything looks good at this point.

However, if I restart the system then the system clock is set 4 hours earlier. (i.e. 4:00 PM real time becomes 12:00PM on the system).

I then have to either force a time resync or mannual set the time to the correct hour. Minutes are not affected -- but the time is set exactly 4 hours back.

This is driving me nuts and I'm looking for a solution to this. Unfortunatly several key tasks on this server are time sensitive and this is causing a real problem.

I have doubled checked that the VMtools is not set to sync the clock to the ESX server.

Thanks for any help.

I'm trying to delete a few files that I created, and I have full permissions on, on a Windows 2008 system.

The files are within a folder that I created so they are not system files of any kind.

The message box that pops up when I try to delete the file is titled "Destination Folder Access Denied", and the message is "you need to confirm this operation", with a continue, skip or cancel button.

I disabled UAC and rebooted to see if this would make the message go away -- it did not. However, with UAC disabled I am able to click on continue and the files are deleted.

With UAC enabled I had to provide elevated credientials before the files would delete.

What causes this behaviour and how can I remove it?

I need to make a change on all computers in our domain. Specifically I need to make a change to the Microsoft Exchange Proxy Settings. Our users have Outlook 2010 installed.

These setting can be mannually accessed from: Control Panel -> Mail -> E-mail Accounts -> (Select Account) -> Change Account -> More Settings -> Connection Tab -> Exchange Proxy Settings

I need to have both the "On fast networks" and "On slow networks" check boxes selected.

Obviously the idea of asking my users to go through the process above to make these changes is not ideal. Therefore I looking for advice on how I can automatically push these setting to my user base.

I have seached the registry but I have been unable to find the location that this setting is saved.

Thanks for any help!

I'm in the preparation stage to roll out a few Windows 2008 R2 Server Core in my VMware ESX environment.

In looking over the documentation it looks like Server Core can operate in a little as 6.5 GB of hard drive space.

Less disk space required. A Server Core installation requires only about 3.5 gigabytes (GB) of disk space to install and approximately 3 GB for operations after the installation.

I am curious as to anyone’s real world experience and recommendations with regard to this requirement. Is it realistic?

A little bit about our environment:

Less than 25 users, and around 75 computers/servers in our current AD system. These systems will be responsible for normal AD operations and print servers for 5 printers - nothing to big here.

I have a question. We have an employee that is going to be on maternity leave for the next 8 weeks.

I think that Outlook/Exchange is designed to send one out of office message to each person that sends an email to my user for the duration of the out of office reply. Meaning that if someone sends an email to my user each week they are only going to receive one out of office message - the first time they send her an e-mail.

My concern is that over time people might forget that she is out of the office. Since they are not receiving any type of reply when they send an email this would seem possible.

Does anyone know if Exchange ever resets the out of message notification after a certain amount of time? Like a week or so? I'm not looking for every message to get an out of office message, but I think more than one over the course of 8 weeks would be appropriate.

I know that I can turn off and turn back on the out of office assistant to "reset" the replies, but I'm curious if Exchange performs a reset after a certain period of time automatically.

I'm looking for advice on which electrical service I should have run to a rack that I have in a data center.

The price is the same for either a 30 AMP 220V circuit or a 60 AMP 120V curcuit.

I realize that these two curcuits are delivering effectivly the same amount of usable power, however I'm curious if one is better than the other. I remember reading somewhere that 220V is more effecient than 120V. If this is true then I'm wondering if that would result in my ability to run more devices off of the 220V power vs. the 120V.

Thanks for any help!

EDIT - This will be running in the US. All servers and Cisco gear that we are running can support either 120V or up to 240V. They are auto switching power supplies. Therefore locking power cables will not be an issue and standard plugs into the servers will be used. This will also be redundent circuits so I will be balancing each one to around 40% load so that in the event one circuit goes down then the other can carry the full load at or around 80%.

We are going through a network redesign and I have 35 Windows 2003/2008 servers at a remote location that I need to change the IP address, gateway and DNS informaiton for.

Ideally I would like to be able to preform this from a command line on my local system (Windows 7) remotly, so I can script out the process to update all systems quickly.

I have looked into netsh, but I'm having problems getting it to change the address remotly. For testing I'm tring to run the following comand which should return the current network config on the remote machine:

netsh -r \\server interface ip show config

However, the following error is returned:

WARNING: Could not obtain host information from machine: [\server]. Some commands may not be available.

The parameter is incorrect.

The following command was not found: interface ip show config.

If I login to the server over RDP I am able to run the command netsh interface ip show config, and I receive the expected results.

This would seem to indicate, as the error is saying, that not all commands and funtions are available from a remote machine as might be available from a local session.

Is there any other method that I can use to accomplish the task of changing the IP address information for these servers remotely?

This weekend we are planning on upgrading our IOS on our Cisco switch. This switch has our three ESX servers and the iSCSI SAN that the ESX server use connected to it.

In the past when we have found it necceary to reboot the switch all running VM's get shutdown, and then rebooted by the ESX hosts. I am trying to avoid this as it is not a graceful shutdown event.

Is there a configuration change that I can make in VirtualCenter that would prevent this from occuring? Or any other ideas as to why this would happen in it's not VirtualCenter related?

I have installed the final RTM version of Windows 7 Professional 64-bit on a test system before we begin the rollout in our company.

I'm having problems connecting to several HP printers that we have on the network. These printers are being shared from a Windows 2003 server host.

I have downloaded the lastest HP Universal Printer driver, however I'm unable to add the 64-bit driver onto the 2003 server system (it's 32 bit).

How can I get connected to these printers from the Windows 7 system?

We are running Active Directory for our network (all Windows based). Single forest with 3 domain controllers.

We're in the process of doing some development work on a desktop application that will be used internally and make a few calls to an AD environment. However, since this is development we want to setup a non-production AD test domain.

Are there any problems in running two AD domains on the same network? It goes without saying that the test domain will have a different domain name, but I just wanted to make sure that I'm not pulling the pin on a grenade or anything :-)

I have a few Windows 2008 servers that I'm trying to setup SNMP monitoring.

I have installed and configured the SNMP service. I have also turned on the exceptions from SNMP and SNMP Traps in the Windows Firewall exception list. However, SNMP traffic is still being blocked.

If I turn off the Windows firewall completely then the SNMP requests work fine.

Is there a known problem with the SNMP and SNMP Trap exception check boxes in the Windows Firewall settings? Is there another place that I need to configure to allow this traffic?

I know that the SNMP community strings are configured correctly (I have doubled checked, and everything works when the firewall is turned off).

Any ideas?

Thanks!

We have a Cisco ASA 5510 firewall with the IPS module installed.

We have a customer that we must connect to via VPN to their network to exchange files via FTP. We use the Cisco VPN client (version 5.0.01.0600) on our local workstations, which are behind the firewall and subject to the IPS.

The VPN client is successful in connecting to the remote site. However when we start the FTP file transfer we are able to upload only 150K to 200K of data, then everything stops. A minute later the VPN session is dropped.

I think I have isolated this to an IPS issue by temporarily disabling the Service Policy on the ASA for the IPS with the following command:

access-list IPS line 1 extended permit ip 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 inactive

After this command was issued I then established the VPN to the remote site and was successful in transferring the entire file.

While still connected to the VPN and FTP session I issued the command to enable the IPS:

access-list IPS line 1 extended permit ip 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0

The file transfer was tried again and was once again successful so I closed the FTP session and reopened it, while keeping the same VPN session open. This file transfer was also successful. This told me that nothing with the FTP programs was being filtered or causing the problem. Furthermore, we use FTP to exchange files with many sites everyday without issue.

I then disconnected the original VPN session, which was established when the access-list was inactive, and reconnected the VPN session, now with the access-list active. After starting the FTP transfer the file stopped after 150K.

To me this seems like the IPS is blocking, or somehow interfering with the initial VPN setup to the remote site.

This only started happening last week after the latest IPS signature updates were applied (sig version 407.0). Our previous sig version was 95 days old becuase the system was not auto updating itself.

Any ideas on what could be causing this problem?

I have 9 Dell 1850 servers that we are going to be relocating from our office to our remote data center.

In any new servers that I purchase I've been including the DRAC card in them for remote management.

I would like to know if anyone has been sucsessful in adding a DRAC card to a server themselves. Ebay has a good selection of cards but I wanted to see if anyone has any experince with this and if there is anything specific I should be aware of.

Thanks.

Back in the Windows 2000 I remember being able to reset and change the local administrator password on remote workstations with the following command from MS KB 272530:

The following .bat file will change the local administrator password to newpass 
on the \\pc1, \\pc2, and \\pc3 computers: 

cusrmgr.exe -u Administrator -m \\pc1 -P newpass
cusrmgr.exe -u Administrator -m \\pc2 -P newpass
cusrmgr.exe -u Administrator -m \\pc3 -P newpass 

However, this command does not seem to work in Windows 2003 or 2008.

Is there a new method that will allow me to change the local administrator password on my remote workstations similar to the cusrmgr command?

I've got a Windows 2003 server that's at my remote data center. This morning I tried to connect to it via RDP, but the connection fails with the following error:

This computer can't connect to the remote computer. Try connecting again. If the problem continues, contact the owner of the remote computer or your network administrator.

I have also trying issuing a remote shutdown/restart command using the "shutdown -i" command from my local system. No error is reported, however the system does not reboot.

This server runs SQL Server 2005 and it is still fully operational and responsive to queries.

I can also remotely connect to the services control panel of the remote system.

Is there anything that I can try to regain control of the system, short of having an operator in the data center do a hard reboot on the server for me?