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.

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.

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.

SharePoint Navigation Limited to 50 Items

There is a limit set in SharePoint by default which only allows fifty links to show up in the navigation. If you add pages and/or subsites beyond the limit of 50, they stop showing up in the navigation.

The right thing to do would be to re-evaluate your SharePoint site structure at this point. Chances are though, that you will need a more immediate work around to get you past this issue in the meantime.

The limit is set in the PortalSiteMapProvider class in SharePoint. Microsoft’s explanation behind this limit is that “Showing a large number of items in the navigation menu is not useful and can have a negative impact on performance”.

Powershell Script to Delete Out Temporary Internet Files

If you have a lot of user profiles on a box, the user profiles can start to take up a lot of disk space. This is especially so on a Citrix or terminal services server, but can affect any system where more than a few people logon. I wrote a quick powershell script that can be scheduled to clean these out.

IIS Log Management Script in Powershell

IIS logs on a busy webserver can use up a lot of disk space. I wrote this little powershell script that I schedule to run on all of my web servers. It goes in and deletes out any IIS logs older than 1 year. Then it compresses any IIS logs that are left which are older than 1 day and are not already compressed. You can change the length of time for these to suit your needs by changeing the numbers in the "AddDays(-123)" parts of the script. Just make sure it's a negative number, or else you won't have any logs left.