Thursday, February 21, 2013

How to Delegate Rights to Modify SPNs in Active Directory

With Kerberos taking over as the preferred authentication protocol, system administrators need to be able to modify the SPN for their service accounts and computer objects in Active Directory. And you don't want to make all of your system administrators domain admins. To delegate this right, you can run the command below on your domain controller.

You have not entered a valid product key or the key is incorrect

The following two errors show up for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2003 users for a couple of reasons.

Error #1
The key is incorrect. Verify that you have the correct key, and then retype it.

Error #2
You have not entered a valid Product Key. Please check the number located on the sticker on the back of the CD case or on your Certificate of Authenticity.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Forceful Demotion of a Dead Domain Controller

If one of your domain controllers dies on you, then you cannot gracefully demote it. So, when this happens there are a few things that you need to do to remove it from the domain and cleanup the mess that this failure created.

The first step is to jump on one of your remaining domain controllers that's running Windows 2003 SP1 or newer.

Monday, February 11, 2013

How to Configure Windows Event Logs as SNMP Traps

There are a lot of different monitoring suites out there that monitor servers by using SNMP traps. If you want to be alerted when a specific error or warning occurs in any of your event logs, you need to configure those events to send an SNMP trap.

To do this, you need to launch %windir%\system32\evntwin.exe to start configuring them. That opens up a window like this.