IT Knowledgebase Articles

Decimal to binary conversion is an important task to understand in IP addressing and Subnetting. IP addressing is a core functionality of networking today. The knowledge of how to assign an IP address, or determine the network or host ID via a subnet, is vital to any good network engineer. Having a good, solid understanding…

In Basics of Cisco Switch Administration – Part 1, we touched on some of the basic uses of the Cisco Network Assistant (CNA). The CNA is a feature-rich product with many uses. In this article, I’d like to focus on several of the common uses of CNA. Let’s take a look… What is Cisco Network…

I found this nice blog by Darren Mar-Elia regarding an issue with editing wireless GPO settings from a Windows XP SP2 machine. I thought it was interesting enough to share, so here is my interpretation of it. If you may recall, Windows Server 2003 has added quite a few good GPO settings, some of which…

In today’s digital world one of the most important pieces of personal identity is the user’s private password. Passwords are used to protect various aspects of our digital life such as our AD user account (used to log on to network resources), email accounts (such as Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail and others), credit card accounts, online…

In previous articles we discussed tools that create users and their mailboxes in Active Directory. LDIFDE has been mentioned and also VBScripts. However, the most powerful and flexible tool in my opinion is Excel. Excel can read information from various formats and can serve as a handy intermediary. You can manipulate the information in Excel…

Creating a trust relationship between two Small Business Server 2000/2003 domains Legal note MS KB 295765 clearly says: “The server is a single-domain solution, which is not intended to be integrated with other Windows domains. You are not permitted to establish explicit trusts to other Microsoft Windows NT nor to Active Directory domains. Also, Small…

This article describes the syntax that you use to build answer files to perform unattended installations of Active Directory Domain Services on Windows Server 2008-based domain controllers. Performing an unattended installation using an answer file is not as hard as it sounds, and can be performed without any user interaction. Using the answer (or sometimes…

System and software downtime frequently mean lost revenues, lowered employee productivity and reduced customer satisfaction. Despite the fact that companies are investing in high-availability systems and performance monitoring solutions for data centers, many are failing to follow best practice procedures to avoid human errors. Do you use any social networks? Follow ObserveIT on Facebook, Linkedin…

In today’s complex network and IT environments more and more people need to gain access to the corporate servers, applications, databases and management tools. Secure Remote Access allow secure access to corporate servers across the Internet, however can you see what these remote users are doing? While trying to minimize the human intervention with these…

In the two previous articles in this series (Planning for Windows Server 2008 Virtualization and Implementing Hyper Vision in Windows Server 2008), I walked you through planning and installing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. In this article, I will continue the discussion by showing you how to install a virtual operating system. Installing a Virtual Operating…