WindowsAdminGuru BLOG

Over the last couple of days I have been setting up Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 RTM. No matter what I tried, I was stuck in a Catch-22: If I logged in as Local Admin on the box, I didn't have permission to make the necessary changes to the domain; if I logged in as Domain Admin, I didn't have permission to write to the local log file on the C:\ drive of the Exchange server. I kept getting errors like the one at right from the GUI, or this one from the command line: Failed to initialize the log file: Access to the path 'C:ExchangeSetupLogs\ExchangeSetup.log' is denied. Setup will not continue. Those are NOT the most descriptive errors. If I logged in as local admin, those errors went away, but instead I received errors that the local admin account didn't have the rights to make massive changes to the domain (shocker). I posted on the Microsoft Technet Exchange forums, and hardly anyone read my post, much less answered it. One person responded that they h...

Windows PowerShell with folder objects and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) objects, but so far we haven't talked about how to use PowerShell to create or manipulate data in Active Directory. One reason we haven't is that working with Active Directory and PowerShell v1 is different from working with the existing providers that both WMI and file system management have. It's not impossible -- just different. This month, we'll introduce how Windows PowerShell works with Active Directory. Adjusting for a more complex environment Imagine the following scenario. You've just started working for a new company and are in charge of user accounts. The company had only a single domain but will soon have two. Your predecessor created roaming profile folders without the domain suffix and your boss tells you that they're about to hire a lot of new people, split between the different domains. The current account-creation scripts are all hard coded. Clearly, you need to ...