Very quick post simply to give me a copy/paste location for a quick XPERF boot trace on the run. If im lucky, it will also be useful to you :) Basic Trace: xbootmgr.exe -trace boot -traceFlags Base+CSWITCH+COMPACT_CSWITCH+FILE_IO+FILE_IO_INIT -postBootDelay...

Hi All I have been recently playing around with an Office Web App Server deployment to support a Lync Server 2013 environment. I thought I'd share my learning's regarding the web farm deployment I did in my lab to test my production build process....

Sometimes I need to replicate customer issues in a Hyper-V lab to fully understand and fix the problem. My labs are typically pretty small and disposable - I set them up for a specific purpose and then trash them. For this reason I use Windows 8 Hyper...

If you need a repeatable way to identify accounts with Kerberos pre-authentication disabled you can do so in the AD Users and Computers UI. (Or PowerShell, or LDP or... ). I personally use this UI a bit because you can configure it and leave it as a neat...

Hi Everyone it's been a while since I published a post and the absence from posting has had me itching to write something up again. I have had plenty to write about just not enough time :), I know world smallest violin is playing! Well, I finally...

There is a nifty feature that comes with Windows Server 2012 which allows you to use PowerShell in a web browser. There are a million use cases for that! Maybe you are walking around with your tablet at work (not just your Surface, but your iPad, or...

Inside Microsoft, there are lots of different moving parts. The company is made up of around 100 000 full time employees. One of the newest but rapidly growing parts is Services. The group I work for sits under Services and is called Premier Field Engineering...

The direct access connection process is reasonably straight forward at a high level. When the DA client changes networks it will attempt to contact the Network Location Server (NLS) that you defined while implementing the solution. If the NLS is not available...

I'm seeing lots of cases were a Direct Access proof of concept has been set up and it works really well for a while with both Windows 8 and Windows 7 (Server 2012 for the DA server - don't waste your time with 2008 R2). The problem is that all of a...

A lot of the time, I am involved in putting teams together and getting them to mesh. Sometimes, I am given the raw materials and have to make the most of what is given to me. Other times, I get to pick and choose and use excuses like "we need the...

Background: A couple of weeks ago I was in the office writing up a report for a Group Policy Health Check that I was doing for a customer. As I was going through the results I asked myself this question. I didn’t know the answer so I asked two...

Hi All I was recently asked by a customer to check through Outlook Mailbox rules for rules that forward mail to external recipients. The customer was worried that company email was being auto-forwarded to external email addresses and hence wanted to...

Hello Everyone! Quick and dirty post today just so i don't forget to write it down... Sometimes in your lab you might need your network connection status indicator (NCSI) to say you are on the Internet, even though you are not. The scenario I've...

While running Win8 Application Excellence labs, I have seen developers hit similar situations each time, that take time away from the labs that could be used for more user experience (UX) and technical feedback. These labs are sponsored by Microsoft...

I've got three weeks of helping customers set up and administer Direct Access 2012 coming up so I wanted to make sure I was ready to handle a setup in a 'real world' type scenario. Although we had a massive readiness season for "Windows 2012 Networking...

Hi Everyone. It's Marc here. Another of your friendly Canberra PFE's. Recently I came across a problem with Performance Monitor's reporting functionality in Windows Server 2008 R2. More specifically, reporting with the Active Directory Diagnostics...

Last week, I sat with a developer in an effort to solve an issue with broken Suspend-Resume handlers in Metro. The developer told me that he was getting inconsistent behaviour with his Suspend handlers and that he suspected a bug in the Metro framework...

A good friend of mine and former colleague is working in an environment of legacy applications, with legacy developers who don't want to take part in any development practice change. He is charged with moving all of their pre .NET apps to a later and...

Hi Everyone I recently discovered that we released a Powershell Supplement to the Lync Server Administration Guide. I must have been asleep that day, because if I had to choose two things in Tech that I passionate about then they would have to be Lync...

Hi Everyone I recently stumbled onto a handy little tool called STrace, from Microsoft, which can be used to interrogate a targeted executable's web service calls. In the world of Lync, especially when your environment has multiple pools and maybe...

Hi Everyone Ewan, a Lync guru, PFE colleague and all round top bloke, and I were teaching a Lync course this week and during our Lync lab sessions we hit some issues installing Lync on a bunch of Front End Servers. I have installed Lync a lot of times...

Hi Everyone I hit an interesting hurdle the other day at a customer location where we were deploying Lync in a test environment. The Lync CMS and Pool databases were going to be hosted on instances in a SQL Server 2008 Cluster, that would be used by...

Hi there, it's Jimmy from the Canberra office on managing and detecting changes to Group Policy. In this post I'm planning on discussing Group Policy, the Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) tool, and tracking/auditing changes to Group Policy. This...

This technique allows you to "re-host" a partition on an Active Directory domain controller without dumping all the other read only partitions (like you would by simply un-checking the global catalog option). It saves time, replication traffic and reduces...

This post introduces an advanced functionality of repadmin.exe which allows us to initiate replication between domain controllers that do not share a connection object. This is useful when you need to be able to predict where a domain controller will...