Schedule a Nightly PerfMon Capture: Data Collector Set + BLG Analysis
Most live PerfMon use is interactive — open the console, drop a few counters in, watch the graph, close. The interactive view answers “what is happening right now,” but doesn’t…
Tag: Windows Server
Track User Logon and Logoff to a Shared Text File via Group Policy Scripts
The Windows event log already records every interactive logon and logoff — events 4624 and 4634 are sitting on every domain-joined client right now. The catch is that those events…
Multi-Location Active Directory, Part 5: Replication Modes and Explicit Bridgehead Servers
The series concludes with two related topics: the difference between intra-location and cross-location replication (very different schedules, very different protocols, very different failure modes), and how to take manual control…
Multi-Location Active Directory, Part 3: Stand Up the Branch DC with Install From Media
Part 2 finished with the headquarters location built out and two DCs in Surat-HO. Now the branch. The challenge: promoting a DC over a slow WAN link with a default…
Multi-Location Active Directory, Part 2: Build Out the Headquarters Location with a Second DC
Part 1 of this series covered the “why” of multi-location Active Directory and built out the four-VM lab. That post ended with one root DC sitting alone in Default-First-Site-Name. This…
Multi-Location Active Directory, Part 1: Why It Exists, Logical vs Physical Topology, and the Lab
Active Directory works the same on a one-office network as it does on a fifty-location global enterprise — until the “the WAN link to the headquarters DC went down” ticket…
Task Scheduler Conditions Tab: Three Preflight Gates That Decide Whether Triggered Means Running
The fourth Task Scheduler tab is the layer most administrators forget exists until they ship a task that mysteriously fails to fire half the time. The Triggers tab decided when;…
Task Scheduler Action Tab: Three Fields, One Working Action, Two Deprecated Stubs
The third tab in the Create-Task dialog is the smallest of the five and the easiest to misconfigure in subtle ways. It defines what the task does when its trigger…
Task Scheduler Trigger Tab: Twelve Fire Sources, Schedule Sub-Options, and the Advanced Modifiers
Once the task has a name and a security context (covered in the General tab walkthrough), the next decision is when it should fire. Task Scheduler exposes twelve different fire…
Task Scheduler General Tab: All 11 Options Walked Through, Field by Field
Windows Task Scheduler is the workhorse that runs everything from nightly log backups to Active Directory health probes to deferred reboot scripts — if it runs unattended on a Windows…
PowerShell Execution Policies: Six Modes, Five Scopes, and the Errors You Will Hit
The PowerShell execution policy is the first thing that gets in the way of running a freshly downloaded script and the first thing every Windows administrator learns to bend. It…
Read repadmin /showrepl Output: Decoding Active Directory Replication Status
Active Directory replication is the silent plumbing that keeps every domain controller in lockstep — password changes, group memberships, GPO edits, schema updates, every directory write fans out from the…