By Brian Swanson on 7/29/2008 6:54 AM

We were out at a customer's site yesterday installing a new Windows 2003 R2 Standard Edition server, and when trying to run DCPROMO to turn the new server into a domain controller we kept getting the message "The version of the Active Directory schema of the source forest is not compatible with the version of Active Directory on this computer."

Our existing server was a Windows 2003 Standard Edition server running Service Pack 2, so I couldn't understand why I'd need to run ADPREP, but I figured the system knows better than I.  I run ADPREP /FORESTPREP from DISK 1 of the Windows 2003 R2 CDs and it tells me everything is fine, that no upgrades to the AD Schema are necessary.  Well after some further investigation, I find there is a NEW version of ADPREP on DISK 2 of the Windows 2003 Server R2 CDs in the \CMPNENTS\R2\ADPREP folder.  When i ran this newly found version, the AD Schema was upgraded and the next attempt at running DCPROMO was successful.

I wish I understood why Microsoft would have hidden...

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By Brian Swanson on 7/29/2008 6:43 AM

I have several email accounts, and have always liked to be overly organized with my incoming emails.  Prior to Outlook 2007, I'd create a folder under my main Inbox folder, and after setting up a new email account would create a rule to move mail coming in on a specific account to go to a specific folder.  This always worked great, but I think Microsoft actually improved things by making it a couple steps easier to accomplish the same task in Outlook 2007.

In Outlook 2007, you still need to create the folder you want your incoming mail from a specific account delivered too (you can point multiple accounts at the same folder, I choose not to), but then after setting up the account you select "Change Folder" button (if it is a POP3 email account) and select a different delivery folder. 

I think "rules" creation was probably overly complicated for the masses for this simple task, and that's why Microsoft added the functionality. Regardless, I like the new functionality.

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By Brian Swanson on 7/23/2008 10:13 AM

If you've ever tried to use GMail or custom domain hosted email with Google Apps on multiple PCs or mobile devices, you've been frustrated.  I've typically actually pointed people to using IMAP if they wanted to check their GMail emails on multiple devices.

It turns out there is a simple trick for allowing multiple PCs/devices to check an account using GMail.  If you add "recent:" to the front of your username you enter when setting up your email account, then GMail will send you all emails that have been received in the last 30 days regardless of whether they have been previously picked up. So your username would be "recent:username@gmail.com" or "recent:username@customdomain.com"

Here's the link on Google's site that describes the same functionality.

By Brian Swanson on 7/22/2008 9:14 AM

This is a problem I noticed some time ago on my various machines I use, and just never took the time to understand why it was happening. Today, I was unzipping a relatively small zip file (~2mb) but it had quite a few files in it, and it amazed me that WinZip was taking 1-2 seconds PER FILE to unzip them.

After some investigation, I found the following FAQ page on WinZip's site: http://www.winzip.com/xattmgr.htm

It turns out that starting with Windows XP SP2, an Attachment Manager service was added that provides some security for downloading of potentially malicious file types from the different zones.

so I started thinking a bit more about it, and I can understand the Attachment Manager "watching my back" if I were unzipping the file directly from the downloaded location.  But I was having the same issue with files I had saved to my Desktop or elsewhere.  Well, if you read the knowledge base article linked at the bottom of the WinZip FAQ page above, you'll see that XP and Vista remember...

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By Brian Swanson on 6/30/2008 11:49 AM

I ran into a strange problem over the weekend...In our efforts to provide more credibility/security for our users we were in the process of getting a couple of SSL certificates for our sites.  As I normally would have done, I went to the IIS Manager, went into the site's properties, clicked on the Security tab, and used the wizard to attempt to create the certificate request.  The challenge was that after completing the wizard I was getting a very ambiguous "Access Denied" error.  After doing a bit of research with Google, I found the issue to be a security permissions issue on /Document and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Microsoft/Crypto/RSA/MachineKeys folder, or files in the folder.

Now, I only skimmed the page that pointed me to this issue, but basically the page said there was a permissions issue, and I should just delete the "MachineKeys" folder, and IIS will re-create it.  Great, did that, as expected the folder was re-created, and I was then able to generate the certificate request.

The...

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