I thought about why managing printing in an enterprise is so frustrating and came to a conclusion that the solutions available (and available to my budget) do not fill end users requirements but IT administrators requirements. Ultimately users what to print something, to the closest printer without having to install printers/drivers or speak to IT, where as IT administrators want to control deployment, configure default settings and centrally control access.
Active Directory
Migrating DHCP from Windows 2003 to Windows 2012 and setting up failover: Part 1
The principles of DHCP are simple and Microsoft has not changed its core since before Windows NT days, however its not something you shouldn’t undertake lightly or ill-prepared. Most of your client devices will rely on DHCP to function and failing to migrate seamlessly will only cause disruptions to your business.
This article is to help document how to migrate multiple active DHCP servers to a new DHCP server running on Windows Server 2012. We will finalise the configuration by creating a failover for all scopes to a secondary server. I am writing the to include all the necessary information that I think is required to complete this successfully.
Decomission a Windows 2003 or 2008 Domain Controller
To decommission an Active Directory Domain Controller (Windows Server 2003/2008) is a fairly straightforward task so long as you make sure nothing is relying on that server specifically. I will cover off the demotions steps (fairly easy) but I will go through a checklist (and how-to) of gotchas that you might get caught out when doing this.
UPDATE: 27/09/2019 – Quick update to say that this is definitely the most popular comment on my blog. Thank you all for the all the comments, and please do keep them coming. The more comments i get, the more likely i will start to write articles again.
Computer name conventions
Computer naming conventions are like creating an Active Directory hierarchy – there is no wrong or right. Its more about what best suits your current and future needs. Over the years my naming conventions have evolved and below I will document my currently preferred method. First we will look at the technical constraints when naming them, and what characters I recommend using.
Automatically generate description field for computers in Active Directory
Having worked in help-desk roles in the past I know the importance of knowing which user has logged onto which computer. Its simple stuff really, but unless you have 3rd party systems like System Center 2012 (SC12) or client agents, its either hard or time consuming to find out the relation between users and computers. What we needed was an easy way to find out what the last logged on user was for every machine.
How to force replication of Domain Controllers
Here is a handy tip on how to force replication of Windows 2008 Domain Controllers using Repadmin. There is a GUI and a command line.
From time to time its necessary to kick off AD replication to speed up a task you may be doing, or just a good too to check the status of replication between DC’s.