Ok, I’ve gone through my mailbox and I’ve got quite some little neat tricks I want to share and most of all never forget myself. So I’ll put them here for future reference.

Tip #1 (Network):

Remember “Network Tracing Awesomeness” If you’d only want to have traffic captured which involves a specific IP you can start the trace like this:

netsh trace start capture = yes ipv4.address=10.90.101.41

This can be very convenient if your server is a domain controller or a file server and communicates with a lot of clients all the time.

Tip #2 (IIS):

In various IIS Kerberos configuration howto’s you are instructed to set useAppPoolCredentials to true. I Always hate editing XML’s directly as it’s quite easy to make errors. Using the following command you can easily set this parameter from a command prompt:

appcmd set config "Default Web Site" /section:windowsauthentication
/useAppPoolCredentials:true /commit:MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST
(the command is supposed to be on one line)

The Default Web Site is the name of the site as it appears in the IIS management console. Remember, you might need to have something like Default Web Site/vDir If you have to configure this for sublevels of the site.

Tip #3 (Kerberos):

If you enable an account to be trusted for delegation to a given service, you might have to wait some time before the service itself notices this. This is often noticed as: I changed something, it didn’t work and magically the next day it started working. If I’m not mistaken, this might have to do with the Kerberos S4U refresh interval which is at 15’ by default. At least that was the value at Windows 2003… See also: KB824905: Event ID 677 and event ID 673 audit failure messages are repeatedly logged to the Security log of domain controllers that are running Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003

Tip #4 (PowerShell):

From: MSDN: Win32_PingStatus class

When you use PowerShell to perform remote tasks on a server, such as WMI queries, it might be way more efficient to do a quick ping before actually trying to talk WMI to the server. This way you can circumvent those nasty timeouts when the server you are trying to talk to is down.

$server = "server01"
$PingStatus = Gwmi Win32_PingStatus -Filter "Address = '$Server'" |Select-Object StatusCode

Tip #5(Tools):

Every once in a while I need a tool from the Sysinternals Utilities set. Mostly I go to google, type in the name, get to the Microsoft site hosting the utility and click launch. However, it seems you easily access all of the tools using this webdav share: \\live.sysinternals.com just enter it in a file explorer or your start-> run. The utilities we all know so well are located in the Tools folder. Or if that doesn’t works, just use http://live.sysinternals.com/ 

Thanks to a colleague for this last tip!

-Stay tuned for more!-