AD Sites and Services: ‘Show Services Node’ Missing?
KB ID 0001448 Problem While working on an old Exchange system this week I wanted to take a look at the ‘autodiscovery’ SCP in AD Sites and Services. Read any post, and you will se that you need to enable ‘Services Node View’ in AD sites and services. To do that you simply right click then go to View > Show Service Node. However, I didn’t get that option? Solution This was driving me crazy for a while,...
PowerShell: Finding Stale User and Computer Accounts
KB ID 0001438 Problem I do this a lot, (usually prior to big migrations), most organisations have no mechanism for removing old users and computers from Active Directory, some don’t even disable the accounts. Find Users Who Have Never Logged On Use the following PowerShell Command; Get-ADUser -Filter { LastLogonDate -notlike “*” -and Enabled -eq $true } -Properties LastLogonDate | Select-Object @{...
Windows ‘Always On’ VPN Part 1 (Domain and PKI)
KB ID 0001399 Problem Always On VPN was a bit of a misnomer when it was released, as it was only really ‘on’ when a user logged on. So when comparing it with ‘Direct Access’ it didn’t have the capacity to ‘Manage Out’. With the release of Windows 10 (1709) this has been rectified with ‘Device Tunnels’, (more on that later). The solution uses RAS, NAP (NPS), and PKI (Certificate...
Exchange Bulk Export / Import Mail Contacts
KB ID 0001349 Problem I had to do this today and realised, it’s been so long since I did it last, I’d forgotten how to do it. Before we go forward, please be clear, I’m talking about MAIL CONTACTS, these are Active Directory Objects that have an Email address, but DO NOT have a mailbox in your Exchange Organisation, and DO NOT have an Active Directory User. I point this out because you can have MAIL USERS that have...
Deploying and Configuring The vCenter Server Appliance
KB ID 0001146 Problem The vCenter Appliance used to be a simple to deploy from OVA, but now you need to deploy it from another machine, (and it has to be a Windows machine). Solution Before you attempt to deploy the appliance, ‘pre-create’ its host records in your DNS. Download the vCenter Appliance .ISO file and mount it on your Windows machine, navigate to the vcsa-iu-installer directory, and run the installer.exe file....