Posts by Clint Wyckoff

Happy Halloween, Veeamers! In the spirit of the season, we're having some fun!

I recently participated in a video interview with Kristy Dalton, GovGirl – the topic of the discussion was how a zombie apocalypse could destroy our data center. This sounds like a tall tale, but disasters can happen to your data. Read on to see how the 3-2-1 rule and more can help your data center.

Imagine the scenario of a zombie apocalypse. The city is being overtaken by the horde, phones are ringing off the hook, it’s complete pandemonium, and all systems are down! This scenario for the IT professional definitely falls in line with the "other duties" category in the job ... Read more

This blogpost is the third in a three-part series on AD (Active Directory) administration best practices. Have you ever had the horrible realization that you just deleted the wrong computer account from the domain? Or have you ever reset a service-account password for a mission-critical application and the password reset broke an entire application suite and had to rollback? And, worse, you didn't save the old password? Bad moments like these happen to IT pros just like you. The questions are how to recover and do it quickly. Thankfully, you CAN restore service quickly. All you need are the right tools.

In Part 1, Protecting the Active Directory Domain Services – Best Practices for AD administration, I focused on protection steps to protect your domain service locally. Unfortunately, most environments have multiple locations, otherwise known as ROBOs (Remote Office Branch Offices). Examples include remote, colocation and cloud data centers, retail stores, satellite offices, distribution centers, manufacturing plants and more. These locations are often geographically separated by many hundreds or thousands of miles, require only simple file, print and share services and are often without an IT staff. Server virtualization has drastically improved the way these services are deployed.

Every component of the Modern Data Center requires authentication of some form or fashion.  Microsoft's Active Directory Services contains information about individual objects within the forest and stores the necessary information in a relational database (ntds.dit). Domain Controllers are the heads of the infrastructure that controls access to resources through an authentication and login process. When a user attempts to access a file on the corporate domain-based file server, either. Kerberos and NTLM are authentication protocols used to verify the identity of a computer or user. To say the least, authentication is critical to the Always-On Business.