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Showing posts from November, 2014

Active Directory NTP

Due to the fact that most Windows authentication operations rely heavily on Kerberos and the significant part that time plays, you should always configure time sources for your active directory forests and domains. In active directory all computers update their time settings from the domains controllers and they in turn update using the domain controller holding the PDC Emulation FSMO role. So you should always verify that your PDC is able to access the extrnal time source. The command I use to check this is  w32tm /stripchart /computer:time.nist.gov.  If you do not get any errors from this command then you're probably set. Another way to check this is to check your firewall's logs after configuring the time settings on PDC. Since a different department may be responsible for the networking, the first way may be the best way to go. One last thing I use do is to run the command on some clients that may have firewalls between them and the domain controllers or to verify NT

Skydrive Crashing

For quite some time now, the Skydrive application on my computer was crushing. I was getting errors in the Application log stating: "Faulting application name: skydrive.exe, version: 6.3.9600.17278". I could also see a lot of Skydrive icons in the tray but they disappeared when I hovered the mouse over them. After some online searched I runned across a post suggesting to use the Onedrive Troubleshooter (you can get it from  here ) to search for problems and reset Onedrive if needed. I ended up resetting and everything is working fine now after an initial sync. There are also some command line switches you can use on skydrive.exe to stop and reset but I haven't used them.

How to get Microsoft Windows system info using Powershell

There are many times that I have to get the system information like Windows Edition, Version, Architecture etc, in order to create support case or post to a forum. Since I use Powershell for almost everything, I have a script with the following commands to get that info: Windows Edition (Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem).Caption Windows Version (Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem).Version Processor Info (Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_OperatingSystem).OSArchitecture I'm using WMI cause I want to be able to get the above info from remote systems as well. If you want more information about a system take a look at the Win32_OperatingSystem class  here . If you want to act based on the above info, it may be better to use some environmental variables and get the exact values.