Priyam Vaidya's Blog

Have you ever wanted to monitor who’s logging into your computer and when? On Professional editions of Windows, you can enable logon auditing to have Windows track which user accounts log in and when. The Audit logon events setting tracks both local logins and network logins. Each logon event specifies the user account that logged on and the time the login took place. You can also see when users logged off. Enable Logon Auditing First, open the local group policy editor – press the Windows key, type gpedit.msc in the Start menu, and press Enter. (You can also enable logon event auditing on a domain controller if you administer a network with centralized logins.) Navigate to the following folder: Local Computer Policy –> Computer Configuration –> Windows Settings –> Security Settings –> Local Policies –> Audit Policy. Double-click the Audit logon events policy setting in the right pane to adjust its options. In the properties window, enable th

When Server Core originally shipped, a lot of Windows admins avoided it because you could only use the command line, but this changes with Windows Server 2012 which enabled the use of a hybrid mode. Turning the GUI Off In Windows Server 8 the GUI has kept with the modular nature of recent Windows Server Operating Systems and in turn has become a “Feature”. This makes removing the GUI very easy. To get started launch Server Manager. Click on Manage, and then select Remove Roles or Features from the menu. Click next to skip past the before you begin page, then select your server from the server pool and click next. Since the GUI is not a Role, we can just click next again to skip past the Roles section. When you reach the Features page, you need to uncheck the box next to the “User Interfaces and Infrastructure” option, and then click next. Now tick the “Restart Destination Server” box, then click remove. The GUI will now be removed. After the binaries are remo

To create a new AD forest called “ArabITPro.local”, select add a new forest. Type the name ArabITPro.local Specify the FFL, DFL, whether or not it should be a DNS Server and also the DSRM administrator password. As you can see, it has selected the GC option by default and you cannot deselect it. The reason for this is that is the very first DC of the AD forest and at least one needs to be a GC. DNS delegation warning. Checks the NetBIOS name already assigned. Specify the location of the AD related folders and then click next. Summary Of All Installation Options/Selections. Click View script for single command  line PowerShell script for dcpromo. Before the actual install of AD, all prerequisites are checked. If All prerequisite checks are passed successfully then click  Install. When you click Install, DNS and the GPMC are installed automatically. After the promotion of the server to a DC finished server restart automat

In Windows Server 2012,  dcpromo has been deprecated . Scenario DNS role already installed. Static IPv4 Assigned. First DC in the forest by the name DC1.MSEXCHANGETEAM.IN Figure 1.1 : Dashboard. In Figure 1.1 Server Manager Dashboard. One stop location to view what Roles and Features are installed and what can be installed. Lets install Active Directory Domain Services Roles. Figure 1.2 : Before you begin. Figure 1.3 : Role-base or feature-based installation Figure 1.4 : Server selection from the Pool. In figure 1.4 it gives us an option to select server from pool . In our scenario its only one server. Figure 1.5 : Select server roles. In windows server 2008 we have to select features separately. In 2012 the wizard itself will give us an option to install the feature for the selected roles. Figure 1.6 : Feature required for Active Directory Domain Figure 1.7 : Features. Default Group policy Management is selected which is required for AD. Figure 1.8 : AD