Brien Posey

Need to keep AD running in top shape with Windows Server 2008? Brien Posey shows you how.

If you have ever done much work with group policies, then you have undoubtedly found out that managing group policies are an organization wide basis can be a complicated endeavor. That’s primarily due to the hierarchical nature of group policies. Group policy settings can be applied at the OU, site, domain, and local computer levels….

Of all the features included in Microsoft Outlook, my favorite has to be cached mode.  In case you’re not familiar with cached mode, it is a mechanism that copies the contents of a user’s mailbox, calendar, etc. into an offline file called an “OST” file.  This allows the user to have full access to anything…

The Windows Performance Monitor has been around in one form or another since the days of Windows NT.  Even so, this is one tool that I rarely see anyone use in the real world.  I suspect that the reason for this is probably that the Performance Monitor tends to be both tedious and difficult to…

In the second article in this series, I mentioned that one of the biggest improvements in performance monitoring was the addition of Data Collector Sets. Data Collector Sets are collections of performance monitor counters and system traces, that are all related to a specific purpose. In this article, I will show you how they work….

When it comes to configuring file servers, many administrators choose to use a distributed file system  (DFS) rather than a traditional standalone share point, because of the redundancy that DFS provides. Although DFS can greatly improve the performance and availability of the data stored on your network, these benefits come at a price. There are…

Note:This article is a follow up to Planning a DFS Architecture Part One and Part Two. Although Windows Server 2008 improves upon DFS technology, DFS has been around for quite a while, and I have learned quite a bit over the years about planning for DFS replication.  I’m not talking about the replication topology itself,…

In the first part of this article series, I talked about the differences between a stand-alone DFS namespace and a domain based DFS namespace.  The next thing I want to discuss is the replication topology that will be used by your DFS servers. Why Replicate? When I have introduced the concept of DFS to clients…

Lately, it seems as though everyone that I talk to is interested in virtualizing at least some of the servers in their organization. Although Hyper-V does a great job as a virtual server hosting solution, it does have some quirks that you might not expect. In this article, I want to talk about some of…

In the previous article in this series, I showed you how to create a postmaster address that could be used to intercept replies to non-delivery reports.  What you might not realize though, is that not all non-delivery reports are created equally.  In this article, I want to show you how to analyze the contents of…

One of the things that I’ve always found interesting about Exchange Server 2007 is that the Exchange Management Console was built on top of the Exchange Management Shell.  As such, anything that you can do through the console can also be done from a command line.  For the most part, I have always preferred to…

In the previous article in this series (Using Exchange Management Shell to Configure Content Filtering, Part 1), I showed you how to use the Set-ContentFilterConfig command to specify bypassed sender domains in Exchange Server 2007. As you may recall though, the biggest problem was that whenever you enter this command, the existing list of bypassed…