DSO's questions

On a Windows 2008 Server I have a scheduled task which is configured to restart if the task fails. Everything works fine if the command succeeds.

However, if the command runs and returns a failure exit code (non-zero), the task does not restart.

Am I missing something? How do I get the task to restart if the command returns a failure code? Isn't this what the "restart on failure" setting supposed to do?

UPDATE

It appears this is by design. It looks like the "restart on failure" setting means to restart if the task scheduler for some reason cannot start the action command (e.g. login failure, ACL issue, etc). If the command is started successfully the task scheduler considers it successful, it doesn't care about the exit code.

I guess one way to work around this is to wrap the command in a script has the retry logic if it fails. Or use a different scheduler as someone suggested.

I have a Windows 2008 server in our corp network which hosts multiple IIS applications. I want to have users access it via multiple names, e.g. http://app1, http://app2. How do I register multiple host names in AD to point to this server? Can I do this myself on the server, or do I need to have a domain admin do this?

What are the pros and cons of choosing a local domain name such as mycompany.local versus a publicly registered domain name such as mycompany.com (assuming that your org has registered the public name)? When would you choose one over the other?

UPDATE

Thanks to Zoredache and Jay for pointing me to this question, which had the most useful responses. That also led me to find this Microsoft Technet article, which states:

It is best to use DNS names that are registered with an Internet authority in the Active Directory namespace. Only registered names are guaranteed to be globally unique. If another organization later registers the same DNS domain name, or if your organization merges with, acquires, or is acquired by other company that uses the same DNS names, then the two infrastructures cannot interact with one another.

Note

Using single label names or unregistered suffixes, such as .local, is not recommended.

Combining this with mrdenny's advice, I think the right approach is to use either:

1. Registered domain name that will never be used publicly (e.g. mycompany.org, mycompany.info, etc).
2. Subdomain of an existing public domain name which will never be used publicly (e.g. corp.mycompany.com).

The "never used publicly" part is a business decision so its probably best to get sign off from those in the company authorized to reserve domain names and subdomains. E.g. you don't want to use a registered name or subdomain that the marketing dept later wants to use for some public marketing campaign.

I know you can do this from the local security policy editor, but I want a command line tool I can run from an automated script. I need this for Windows XP and above clients.

Bonus question (sort of philosophical): why is auditing of user logon/logoffs not enabled by default on Windows? It's logging a lot of other things by default which are less useful (IMO), why not this?

I'm formatting a drive using NTFS which will be dedicated as a file share for users to centrally store their files. The files will likely be large (10's to 100's of megabytes).

Someone suggested that using a large allocation unit size than the default 4k (e.g. 64k) will make it perform better. I think I understand the basic principle behind it, but I'm not sure if its valid in practice. Will this truly make a difference or is this something that may cause more problems than it solves?

Is there a trustworthy online backup service with client software that does backups without a user logged in?

I have been using Mozy combined with some custom python scripts for doing offsite backups of a Subversion repository on a Windows server. This has been working fine, except that it stops working when a user is not logged in, which happens whenever the server is patched and rebooted.

I think this is because Mozy is designed for backup up user data, not server. I haven't tried Carbonite yet but I'm guessing that is the same?