Outages . Aside from the massive pressure of having to restore service, they can be pretty useful to learn new things. One recent discovery that was news to me is that you can use netsh to capture network traces. It appears on modern-ish operating systems (Windows 7/Windows 2008 R2 and above) you no longer need to install your favorite packet tracing application to capture packets. Who doesn’t like to cuddle up with a nice packet trace, eh? Obviously if you’re on a desktop OS, you should just load packet capturing utility of choice (and it had better be Network Monitor if you intend to open the .ETL trace ) -- unless you like to read it in some other way. That would mean your skillz are simply amazing and are wasting your time here! RUNNING A TRACE The most basic way to start and stop a trace is by performing the following commands: As you can see, netsh displays the trace configuration as well. It’s not the full configuration of defaults though. netsh trace start capture=ye
Problem Everyone has been through it. We've all had to retire or replace a domain controller at some point in our checkered collective experiences. While AD provides very intelligent high availability, some applications are just plain dumb. They do not observe site awareness or participate in locating a domain controller. All they want is the name or IP of one domain controller which gets hardcoded in a configuration file somewhere, deeply embedded in some file folder or setting that you are never going to find. How do you look at a DC and decide which applications might be doing it? Packet trace? Logs? Shut it down and wait for screaming? It seems very tedious and nearly impossible. Potential Solution Obviously I wouldn't even bother posting this if I hadn't run across something interesting. :) I ran across something in draftcalled Domain Controller Isolation. Since it's in draft, I don't know that it's published yet. HOWEVER, the concept is based off