Month: February 2010

New Windows 2008 R2: Offline domain join

Another new feature that Windows brings 2008 R2, is the ability to join a domain offline, This is, we don't need to have connectivity between the computer and the domain controller to join, avoiding traffic between both devices. This is ideal when deploying large numbers of computers or sending them to our branch offices ready to be started (generated from images), so that we don't have to join them to the domain from there and can join them using AIK through an answer file (For example).

New in Windows 2008 R2: Managed Service Account

One of the new features brought by Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 is the 'Managed Service Accounts', which are user accounts that we may assign to our services. It is well known that in our Active Directory we have assigned password expiration policies and we always have a service that does not start with a local system account or SYSTEM, with more privileges. To avoid this hassle of managing accounts with expiring passwords, or that they are vulnerable since the password is always the same and can allow someone to take advantage of that, Microsoft has released this new feature, Of course, to be able to use it, our Active Directory has to be in “Windows Server 2008 R2”.

Using PowerGUI and its PowerPacks

PowerGUI is one of the best free tools, especially for those of us who work with PowerShell environments and still do not feel comfortable, it is a graphic tool that allows us to create, edit, import, export our Windows PowerShell-based scripts. In this document we will see how to install it that has nothing and how we can organize our scripts, as well as being able to see how to use scripts for VMware, Exchange, Active Directory, SQL, Routers, communications, Internet, Systems Center, Operations Manager, Xen, Hyper-V, Citrix, Skype, Reporting, Twitter … everything that relies on PowerShell.