IT Knowledgebase Articles

Windows Vista shipped without including a number of DLL files for legacy graphics engines like Direct3D.   When attempting to use games or 3D applications that require these DLLs, users can get a range of “required DLL missing” error messages. Additionally, we’ve noticed that there are quite a few searches on the internal Petri search engines…

One of the most frequent questions on virtualization forums that deal with server deployments is the question of how should one deploy their Active Directory domain controllers. Should they be deployed on stand-alone separate servers, should they be kept on separate physical servers, or should they be run inside virtual machines that are hosted on…

Remotely accessing your servers and workstations through terminal services or RDP is an easy method of doing your job from a remote location, or gaining access to specific published applications that have been published on your servers. However, without properly investing in securing these types of RDP connections, you could be compromising the security and…

In the past year notebooks have outsold desktop computers for the first time. If you have Outlook both on your Desktop computer and on your notebook (or netbook), then you’ll want to have the same e-mails, contacts and calendars and both machines. This article provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to do exactly that with…

How do I deploy SP1? Service Pack 1 (SP1) includes installation files that you can extract from the XPsp1.exe file. This file contains all of the service pack binary files that have been updated for SP1; it also contains the Update.exe program file. XPsp1.exe is a self-extracting compressed file. You can extract all of the…

VMware ESX server is an amazing and complex product. It combines a Linux Service console with the power to run multiple virtual machine operating systems, all on the same server. There are a number of ways to administer ESX. Perhaps you are considering VMware ESX server or maybe you have it installed but want to…

Have you ever made a change to your VMware ESX Server Network configuration using the Virtual Infrastructure (VI) Client and then lost communications with the server? If you had to go to the ESX Service console to troubleshoot the virtual network configuration, would you know the commands to do it? In this article, you will…

With the growing popularity of VMware Infrastructure & ESX Server, there are an ever growing number of 3rd party tools available for ESX Server. In this article, we will provide a list of ESX 3rd party tools you should consider as add-ons for your ESX Servers. Take a look… What applications do I get with…

A word about working with Group Policy Objects (GPOs) and Terminal Servers Recently I had a long conversation with one of my clients about the proper way for using GPOs. I think my readers could benefit from the stuff that was said there. Naturally, the client’s name and details are not an issue and are…

  As described in the previous articles in this series, Active Directory snapshots in Windows Server 2008 allow an administrator to create snapshots of the Active Directory database. By using them, you can view the data inside such a snapshot and use it to restore or inspect data without the need to start the server…