TCP will keep you alive

Recently I took some time looking into TCP keep-alive and how it works in a Windows environment. Seeing that I already had a summary written on the subject, I’ve decided this is an opportunity for a blog post. So, here we go… Applications are often client-server based. In some cases you’ll want the client to keep the connection to the server open, even if it’s been idle for a while. Usually, you’ll want that if making a new connection is too “costly”, being it time or performance or any other consideration. Connections are usually interrupted...

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Presentation is everything

Hi everyone, I've made a few presentations recently I'd like to bring to your attention. First up, is a presentation I made at a developers conference that covers 2 new features in Windows Server 2012. The driving idea behind it, was to highlight “sexy” features in Windows Server 2012 and maybe make the developers want to upgrade from whatever they're using right now. You can find it right here : http://prezi.com/-hjwi4wdmf6k/whats-new-in-windows-server-2012-highlights/ Second one, is a short presentation I made covering the basics...

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Error 258 and the tale of the Hidden attribute

Hi everyone, It's been a while since I've read my last point, but now I'm back. I will try to maintain this blog with a steady feed of interesting and relevant info concerning some of the products that Microsoft makes for enterprises and everything around that (Nothing new here). This time, I would like to go into MS cluster and some issues regarding Physical Disk resources. It all started a few days ago... Background: Got a call from our Ops Center telling me that one of our Exchange 2003 (few of them around) could not fail-over...

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Orphaned Sites and how to treat them

Hello again, Today I'll be talking about time sync and what it has to do with GPO.Recently, we've been experiencing some issues with station in certain sites not receiving GPO from the Domain.We've been troubleshooting this issue for a while and there seemed to be no problem with our station, their logon process was correct and each station knew the which dc was the closest to her (or so we thought).As it turns out, the common problem with all the station that were experiencing difficulties with GPO was W32Time Errors in the System Event...

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A LDAP in VBScript's Clothing

Hello again, It's been a while since my last post. Haven't been inspired much lately.This post will be a short one, and hopefully the next one will be longer and will interest you more - I'm planning on doing a piece regarding DFS. So, we had a situation today that required us to change a specific user attribute for all users in a specific group.There are a couple of ways to deal with this situation. If this is a so-called "Mainstream" attribute, you can use the infamous dsmod cmd tool-  it allows you to change certain attributes,...

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Your Authentication is only as good as your last packet

Hello again, It's seems a bit unfortunate, that the times when I'm really inspired to write are the times when everything (or almost everything) comes crashing. So, in short, today I'll write a little Kerberos Authentication and how it's affected by the smallest things. Just a while ago, one of our clients called with a problem - his web server was working awfully slow, to the point where certain actions got a timeout after about 20 minutes of being stuck on a post request.In order to clarify, both servers are running on Win 2003 Std...

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When stations play Hide and Seek with DCs

Hey guys, I hope to keep this post short, because it's not really something super complex. b.t.w I'll be on vacation this week, so don't expect anything out of the ordinary - muse usually comes to me at work :) Today I'd like to talk about how a station chooses (or rather locates) a DC to communicate with. It's been on my mind this week, because I've had an opportunity to be a part of a technical job interview and the guy we interviewed didn't seem to know how this process works. I'd like to dedicate this post to him.  To start...

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