Tom Decaluwé

I’m enjoying a short X-mas holiday at the moment and thought this would be a great moment to spend some time really digging in with Win8 Developer Preview.

As this is still a very early stage of software I can tell you it’s still quite buggy but never the less I’m enjoying it and have found some really cool things. One I’m very excited about and want to share with you is the new ADAC Active Directory Administrative Center and the build in fine grained password solution.

As soon as you install you first win8 DC you will be greeted with the Green Field metro interface containing the AD tools you would expect (Note that DNS will be missing from a vanilla install, you need to add the RSAT DNS tool feature as the MMC does not install by default, I hope they categorize this as a bug).

The ADAC is now installed by default in win8

You need to turn a blind eye to the logo’s as a lot in win8 is still pretending to be win2008 R2

The tool itself is still very familiar and unchanged and in essence you are still doing what you use to do in it except when you drill down the AD tree > system > password Settings Container and right click

you now see your Password Settings option.

Click that and the fine grained password policy dialog opens up.

Set the values according to your needs and don’t’ forget the function of

Precedence (msDS-PasswordSettingsPrecedence). This is an integer value that is used to resolve conflicts if multiple PSOs are applied to a user or group object.

you can, as before target you PW policy to the user level or a group of users

If you now head down to the User properties, double click the user

choose the Password settings tab you will see the affective policy.

you can also right click the user object and select view resultant password settings

Just to be sure this all worked I tried it out and sure enough this is working just as expected.

In the end the interface is still doing what we used to do directly in ADSI Edit but the new interface makes this all just so much easier.

Now let’s hope I can get some of the other great new win8 stuff to work so I can share even more experiences on my blog.

I’m currently heading a project to activate new MPLS lines in a number of companies. One of the things we need to do during test and turn up is check the line speed for the different classes of service. We have defined three bands within our MPLS link giving 10% to real time Class, 20% to line of business apps and 70% to other traffic.

To ensure fast initial feedback during test and turn-up we use iperf. This is a great little tool that allows you to setup a listener service on a receiving end and a client service. The tool can be configured to listen on any TCP or UDP port and it has loads of options.

How to get it to work:

Server side: iperf –s –p 5555 to make it listen on TCP 5555 | iperf –s –u 5555 to make it listen on a UDP port

Client side: iperf –c <ip|hostname> –p 5555r to make it transfer on TCP 5555 | iperf –c <ip|hostname> –u 5555 to make it transmit on UDP port

on the server side you will see some feedback from the tool as well

you can download it at:

http://mayoxide.com/iperf/

The tool is not perfect but it does help you to quickly get started with network testing. After the initial iperf testing we do more deep testing using a combination of:

- Netcat => to do raw data transfer and put strain on the lines on different ports

- Wireshark => using io Graphs we keep track of the different data streams and can see how the line reacts when putting data on the different COS levels.

- DU-meter => to measure and visualize data traffic

If you have not registered for Techdays 2012 yet, you’ll be very happy to read the Early Bird period has been extended to 21 December 2011.

This give you another 10 more days to ensure you have a budget friendly seat at this terrific and very educational event.

With windows 8 coming your way it’s an ideal opportunity to know what’s coming you way before other know and provides you a unique opportunity to learn and find what windows 8 can do for you and your company on both the technology and cost level.

It the single biggest and best Microsoft opportunity to meet experts and talk to peers. Making you knowledge Win8 Ready.

As technology advances and en users bring in more and more devices you have never seen, it gets more and more difficult to know everything all the time. You are faced with problems, need answers and would welcome the opportunity to ask an expert that speaks our own language and better understands regional requirements?

Then meet, MEET. This new initiative from Microsoft Belgium brings all the expert knowledge from Belgium to one central location The MEET page.

On this page you’ll find contact details for Belgian, real world experts that want to share knowledge regardless if they are current MVP’s , potential future MVP’s or people that are just to good for words!

check out their contact page: