Martin one of our famous blog readers submitted a wish, … He would love to see a list of of the most useful mac os x apps. I know there are lots of other sites on the web taking care of it already, but hey guys its a growing community. Well keep up your great work. Martin.

The question is not so easy answered though. Mac OS X leopard has already most of the things I need built-in. But there are still some. Let us start with some basic tools I use.

Administration, Ask a geek, Software Cyberduck, freeciv, keypass, Latex, mac, os x, Skype, vmware

Sometimes bad things happen, sometimes ugly things happen. One of the very bad things that can happen is when an active domain controller crashes and there is no backup available. The case becomes really ugly if nobody cares about the crashed controller for about 60 days (forest that was created on a domain controller running Windows Server 2003 and earlier) or 180 days (forest that was created on a domain controller running Windows Server 2003 sp1 and later). On this depends the default tombstone lifetime of directory objects. Later we will investigate on the tombstone. 

Administration AD, Controller, Domain, FSMO

For a project I have to learn some of the specialty of an iScsi NAS. To be precise it was Net App FAS 2500 Filer. These things are very nice but a little too expensive for my personal use. But Net App offers a nice simulator of their product and the simulator is free. You just need to create an account on the Net App web site and search for the word ”simulator” or just follow this link. (http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/simulator). Some bloody side note: the website doesn’t work fine with safari. Just use Firefox and all works well in this case.

Administration, Hardware, Software .NET, app, filer, nas, NetApp, vmware

Remote software for free

Normally I’m not a big promoter of software. But this tool is amazing. Every, and I mean every IT Professional is having the same problem. Everybody in the world looks at you and sees the free helpdesk. Ok I must admit most of the time this is not a problem because helping is caring friendship. Helping over the phone is good because you don’t have to travel. But this is not easy for each occasion. There are a lot of good remote software programs for companies. But the use in private environments is not as easy as it should be because you need port forwarding, special firewall rules etc. Looking around in the Internet I found a very exciting tool for remote support. It’s called TeamViewer.

Administration, Software Remote, Support, teamviewer, VNC

This week a nice opportunity knocked on the door. As a windows server administrator in large companies you cannot configure every day switches and routers from the basis. Normally some network guy will do the configuration of the cool Cisco stuff for you. The configuration of Cisco is very easy when you know something about networks. The only problem is to know the commands. This week and in the next post we’ll do an easy basic configuration together. The lab is created in an old version of the boson NetSim. Witch is a Cisco IOS and a Cat OS Simulator. It is not the best tool, but it will do the job.

Administration, Hardware Cisco, ios

Today we take a closer look at the Microsoft Active Directory in the 2008 native mode. One of the problems that windows administrators often face in the daily business is the setting of password policies for the whole company. Under Windows Server 2003 it was not possible to set more than one policy for the accounts. So from the domain administrator to the user every body needed the same complex password. Under active directory in version 2008 there is a new object type in the schema which is called PSO (password settings object). The only way to create the PSO is in ADSI edit. Click on start and enter “adsiedit.msc”.

Administration, Security password, policy, pso

One of the hard tasks in the daily live of an IT administrator is to ensure that the network and the server are secure. The perfect security is not possible. There will always be some small leaks either provoked through the behavior of the user in version 1.0 or the administrator of the system. Not to mention design leaks in the software itself. Most environments are too large and too complex for a manual checkup of all security patches and service packs. One other factor is most users need some higher rights on their machine to do their work. This often results in disabling the windows firewall. These two scenarios are big the root of all evil.

Administration, Security MSBA, Security, server, Windows

I’m owner of an ASUS eeePC with 4 GB and 16 GB SSD hard drive. After changing the OS from ubuntu to Windows XP, everything works very well except the speed is a bit slow but I can live with it. The 4 GB SSD is my primary boot partition with the “%systemroot%” (“C:\” drive), so space is a little short. After all Windows updates and some program installations there are 150 MB left. This is ok for my purpose but windows starts to bother me with balloon tips.

Administration balloon, low Disk Space, tip, windows XP

Part One. Today and in my next posts, we want to take a closer look at the security settings of windows server. One good way to start is the “Security Configuration Wizard” later called as SCW. The wizard was patched in the operating system with SP1. In the release 2 of windows server 2003 you don’t need to patch – it’s from start up SP2.

Administration, Software 2003, Baseline Security, scw, Security Configuration Wizard, server, Windows

I’m quite sure you know Powershell – this incredibly fancy Shell that allows you to do things you couldn’t even imagine without

Version 1.1 of Powershell is now heavy on market – every new software from Microsoft must be powershell-enabled.

But the best thing is that Microsoft announced, Powershell will be installed by default on every copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. And as far as I know there will be support for Powershell in Windows Server Core.

Find the details here

Administration, Software Powershell, Server Core, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2