Last week I saw a tweet that referenced a couple of interesting articles on interview questions for programmers. Steve Yegge's The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions had an interesting question about identifying which of 50,000 web pages had phone numbers in them. You have to identify all of the web pages with phone …

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This week while working with some PowerShell scripts that retrieve WMI information from remote servers, I ran into an issue where I was able to return results from Windows 2008 R2 servers without issue but was unable to return results from Windows 2008 (non-R2) servers even though they had PowerShell 2.0 installed and …

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I ran into an issue lately where the domain controller that hosts the PDC emulator FSMO role for the forest root domain became unavailable and the time for several machines in the domain was far enough off to start causing kerberos related security problems. Here's a simply Powershell script to query the time on remote …

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A few weeks ago a user contacted me and stated they were constantly being locked out throughout the day. This could have been caused by a number of things from someone else trying to log in as them to being logged in somewhere else, changing their password and the session with the old password still being active. I ran …

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This week, I was asked if I could export a list of users who were members of a specific group in Active Directory. What's this list for? We're working on a project that requires us to create a new security group in Active Directory and we're going to add all the users on the list to the new group. I determined that …

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This blog article is a scenario that I sent a coworker a while back about recovering a SQL Server database up to the point in time where a catastrophic hard disk drive failure occurs for the hard drive containing a SQL Server database. The transaction log for this database is on a separate physical disk and is still …

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