microsoft

Situation You’re using PrintBRM.exe to migrate printers between servers (or to backup and later restore them on the same server) but when it tries to restore the print queues it fails with “Failed to restore print queue <Printer name>. Error 0x800706d9” Cause PrintBRM tries to query the Windows Firewall when it creates the shares for the print queues. If the Windows Firewall service is disabled, this step fails and the print queue is not created....

One of the most annoying things when working with Powershell and AD accounts is the UserAccountControl value. This value is what determines settings such as whether or not the account is locked out, disabled, requires a smartcard for authentication, uses reversible encryption for its password, etc. The default is 512 (NORMAL_ACCOUNT) but there are all kinds of weird and wonderful combinations that can turn up depending on how the account is configured and when you’re trying to (for example) find all the accounts that are set to USE_DES_KEY_ONLY then having so many different possible values (any number that could have 2097152 as part of its makeup) makes it a pain to work out....

I ran into an issue this morning with a pair of Windows 2003 Server DCs that were set to sync their clocks using NT5DS (which is the default and means they should sync from the domain hierarchy, which for DCs is often the PDC emulator). They kept logging the following error in the System Log: The time provider NtpClient was unable to find a domain controller to use as a time source....

Windows has a centralised logging facility for applications; the Windows Event Log. If you’re writing applications for Windows then for the love of God please use it properly. DO create your own event message DLL(s) where appropriate to avoid your events looking like this DO log important errors and warnings. Application failures, communication issues, invalid configuration data and the like. Things that will help administrators to troubleshoot issues that may occur....