WindowsAdminGuru BLOG

** You can add comments to your XML answer files to keep track of what your answer files are used for. If you have lots of unattend.xml or autounattend.xml answer files, how can you keep track of which is which? The easy way is to add a comment to each answer file. To add comments, use the standard HTML comment syntax, which is described here. http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_comment.asp **

** Question: How can I recover a DNS database from the registry in the Microsoft Management Console? Answer: If you are using Active Directory-integrated DNS, then your DNS information is stored in Active Directory itself, and you'll need to perform a System State restore to retrieve it. If you are using standard primary and secondary zone files, these are stored in the %windowsroot%system32DNS directory and would need to be restored from there. **

&& How to move the location where user profiles are stored in Windows Vista. A common question is how you can move the default location where user profiles are stored in Windows Visty from the C:\Users directory to some other location, for example a second hard drive named D: or perhaps elsewhere. Unfortunately, if you want to do this after you’ve installed Vista on the system, the answer is you can’t. Or more specifically, there’s no supported way of doing this, so don’t even try hacking around in this regard. However, you can do this during the installation process by configuring a setting named ProfilesDirectory in your unattend.xml answer file, and this is the only supported method for moving the profile directory in Vista. **

^^ Here is a quick tip to finding out where the FSMO roles for a domain are located. When dealing with Active Directory on a domain that is unfamiliar, you may be placed in a situation where you have to verify the location of the domains FSMO roles. One of the quickest ways to do this is through the netdom utility which is part of the Windows Server 2003 support tools package. You can view the location of all five FSMO roles by using this command: Netdom query fsmo **

** You can add comments to your XML answer files to keep track of what your answer files are used for. If you have lots of unattend.xml or autounattend.xml answer files, how can you keep track of which is which? The easy way is to add a comment to each answer file. To add comments, use the standard HTML comment syntax, which is described here. http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_comment.asp **

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 ...