Geek projects, tidbits and things I'm working on at the moment…

I’m getting ready to migrate our AD servers to a virtual environment and one of the things that can get messed up is the AD servers’ time. Also, I’m joining some non Windows systems to the Windows domain which might encounter some time sync issues since they aren’t currently configured to use the domain’s NTP server (easy fix I know but I’m saving that for another post!)

Short story long, your AD server typically uses its’ CMOS time versus an external NTP server which is all fine and good so long as A) it’s a real hardware server not a virtualized one and B) No other servers in your infrastructure use other NTP servers (ie. Linux server ‘A’ isn’t using tick.usno.navy.mil which will have a different time then your main AD server which is going off of it’s CMOS clock!)

So, I did some searching on the interwebs and stumbled upon a couple of useful links on how to modify your registry on your AD server so it:

A) Uses an external time source versus the CMOS time & date.

B) Has a number of servers to attempt time updates from (use spaces to delimit servers! and don’t forget to append “,0x1” at the end if you’re using a FQDN versus an IP Address!)

C)…I forget C!

Anyhow, here’s some links I wrangled up.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816042#method2

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/configuring-windows-time-service.html

 http://www.sole.dk/how-to-configure-your-virtual-domain-controllers-and-avoid-simple-mistakes-with-resulting-big-problems/ (this one was most helpful!)

I’ve installed WordPress websites several times on various Linux distros w/o issue but today I needed to install WordPress on a Windows 2008 R2 Server for the first time. Thankfully WordPress.org had an entire webpage up on just how to do it. Looks like they’re using a Microsoft publishing site called Web App Gallery or Web Platform Installer to install not only WordPress but also any dependencies and also do the initial configuration. The only problem I had was getting WordPress to update itself via FTP. Not only do you need to install the FTP server under the IIS additional roles but you need to explicitly give that FTP user account modify & write permissions to your wwwroot folder which is housing your WordPress files.

WordPress IIS page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_on_Microsoft_IIS

Microsoft’s Web App Gallery page:
http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

So I’ve recently installed Remote Desktop Services at work for testing purposes. I haven’t decided if we’re going to use RDS or something from Citrix. When doing the install I opt’d for the RD web access & gateway pieces so folks can use RDS over port 443. One of the first things I noticed was the generic title page of “Remote Desktop Services Default Connection” which I wasn’t to happy about. Did some quick Googling and found out you can change the text on the webpage by editing the RDWebAccess.config file. Just look for the <WorkspaceSettings Name=””> key and change it to what you want. I found the file at C:\Windows\Web\RDWeb\App_Data folder.

Need to give credit to Matt’s blog over at Bunker Hollow.
http://www.bunkerhollow.com/blogs/matt/archive/2010/02/05/rename-quot-remote-desktop-services-default-connection-quot.aspx

Thanks Matt!