Canberra Premier Field Engineering: Team Blog

Technical notes from Canberra's team of Microsoft Field Engineers.

Routing Traffic between Subnets in your Hyper-V Lab

Sometimes I need to replicate customer issues in a Hyper-V lab to fully understand and fix the...

Author: Scott Duffey (Scottduf) Date: 04/22/2013

Identify Accounts with Kerberos Pre-Authentication Disabled (In the UI)

If you need a repeatable way to identify accounts with Kerberos pre-authentication disabled you can...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 03/18/2013

Using IM and Presence in Exchange Server 2010 OWA against a Lync Server 2013 Front End Pool

Hi Everyone it's been a while since I published a post and the absence from posting has had me...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 03/04/2013

PowerShell Web Access (very) Quick Start. [Yep, PowerShell in your web browser...]

There is a nifty feature that comes with Windows Server 2012 which allows you to use PowerShell in a...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 02/16/2013

The Direct Access connection process... according to Netmon.

The direct access connection process is reasonably straight forward at a high level. When the DA...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 01/12/2013

Direct Access for Windows 7 Works! ... and then it stops.

I'm seeing lots of cases were a Direct Access proof of concept has been set up and it works really...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 12/07/2012

Where are site-linked Group Policy Objects Stored? And why should you care?

Background: A couple of weeks ago I was in the office writing up a report for a Group Policy Health...

Author: Scott Duffey (Scottduf) Date: 11/15/2012

Ever needed to find Server Side Outlook rules that forward mail outside of your organisation?

Hi All I was recently asked by a customer to check through Outlook Mailbox rules for rules that...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 11/05/2012

Fake Internet Connectivity for your Lab (Tricking NCSI)

Hello Everyone! Quick and dirty post today just so i don't forget to write it down... Sometimes in...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 10/09/2012

Issues with Perfmon reporting - Turning ETL into HTML

Hi Everyone. It's Marc here. Another of your friendly Canberra PFE's. Recently I came across a...

Author: Marc Dudok Date: 07/05/2012

Managing Lync with Powershell - Lync Server Admin Guide Powershell Supplement

Hi Everyone I recently discovered that we released a Powershell Supplement to the Lync Server...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 06/05/2012

Have you ever wondered what web service URLs are used by the Lync client? STrace is your tool.

Hi Everyone I recently stumbled onto a handy little tool called STrace, from Microsoft, which can be...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 06/04/2012

Lync Installation Error: Prerequisite installation failed: SQLExpressRtcLocal 536870913

Hi Everyone Ewan, a Lync guru, PFE colleague and all round top bloke, and I were teaching a Lync...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 05/17/2012

Installing Lync Databases on a SQL Cluster (or standalone SQL back end) - Error_Create_DB (-4)

Hi Everyone I hit an interesting hurdle the other day at a customer location where we were deploying...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 05/09/2012

Auditing Group Policy changes

Hi there, it's Jimmy from the Canberra office on managing and detecting changes to Group Policy. In...

Author: JimmyF_Aus Date: 05/01/2012

Un-Hosting & Re-Hosting Active Directory Partitions

This technique allows you to "re-host" a partition on an Active Directory domain controller without...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 04/13/2012

Granular Active Directory replication for advanced troubleshooting scenarios

This post introduces an advanced functionality of repadmin.exe which allows us to initiate...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 04/11/2012

Backing up GPOs with a Powershell script

Hi everyone One of the recommendations I often make to customers is to ensure that they are...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 04/10/2012

Active Directory Replication: Change Notification & You

**UPDATE: One of our readers has kindly pointed out the correct intra-site replication interval of...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 03/25/2012

Visit to Microsoft Technical Support (Las Colinas, Texas)

Microsoft Premier Field Engineering is giving me an amazing opportunity to spend a few weeks with...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 03/14/2012

Kerberos Troubleshooting

There is an amazing white paper published on this topic which is available here:...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 01/01/2012

Sharepoint 2010 monitoring & Troubleshooting

The slide deck from the Canberra Premier Briefing day is attached. This was put together by our...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 12/18/2011

"Managing Exchange Server 2010 with Powershell" slides from Premier Briefing Day in Canberra

Thanks for those die hard Exchange Admins who came along to the Premier Briefing Day in Canberra...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 12/18/2011

Branchcache slides from Premier Briefing Day in Canberra

Thanks for those that came along to the Premier Briefing Day in Canberra 2011. This is the slide...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 12/16/2011

Server Performance Advisor 3: First Look

The latest version of the server performance advisor has been released. Version 3 ALPHA can be...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 09/02/2011

Blue Screen: Beware Verifier Settings on Production Machines

Recently we had a case where the customer was reporting blue screen crashes every time the server...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 09/02/2011

Outlook 2010 - Allowing or blocking attachments with Group Policy

Hi All if you need to allow or disallow a set of attachment files in Outlook 2010 with an Exchange...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 08/24/2011

MSExchangeTransport 5031 Routing - Access Denied Errors and Network Service

Hi All If you are seeing access denied 5031 errors sourced from the MSExchangeTransport service like...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 08/12/2011

Ever wondered how to work out when a particular attribute of an AD object has changed?

Hi all I recently got asked to work out when a particular Active Directory object attribute was...

Author: Steve Moore - SFB - Office 365 Engineer Date: 08/04/2011

Create a quick 100 users with PowerShell

1..100 | ForEach { Net User “TestUser$_” Password1 /ADD /Domain}

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Identify the ISTG's

To locate the ISTG role holders for all sites Click Start, click Run, type Ldp, and then click OK....

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Dumping the AD Database

A good way to gain understanding into the way AD works is to take a look inside the database. To...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Auditing Improvements

Big improvements from 2003 to 2008 in the level of granularity and also the detail. For example,...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Testing the DcLocator Process

Comments Off DcLocator calling DSGetDCName function: NLTEST /DSGETDC:contoso.com...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Multiple Domain Controllers in a site with a RODC

Generally a RODC is designed for sites where physical security is an issue, so placing a RWDC in the...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Adding attributes to the RODC Filtered Attribute Set

To add an attribute to the Filtered Attribute Set (the stuff that wont replicate to a RODC) you...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Forest Functional Levels - What you get

Windows 2000 Default AD Features Windows 2003 - Forest Trusts - Domain Rename - Link Valued...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Domain Functional Levels - What you Get

Windows 2000 Native: - Universal Groups - Group Nesting - Group Conversion between security and...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Portqry.exe to troubleshoot dynamic ports

Download portqry if its not already installed:...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Group Policy Notes

Where to look for policies that have been applied to the user and computer: Computer:...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Kerberos Delegation Lab

If you want to mess around with Kerberos delegation but dont want to install any heavy multi-tiered...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

Kerberos Notes

Kerberos is not a Microsoft technology, it was developed by MIT and documented as RFC 1510 (1510 is...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

"Preparing Network Connections" - Domain Controller in a Lab

If you get yourself into trouble with DNS on a domain controller you might sit on the "Preparing...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

2003 Branch Office Deployment Guide

The 2003 Version of the Branch Office Deployment Guide (BODG) is brilliant. It takes you through an...

Author: Chad Duffey Date: 07/08/2011

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