As a network administrator I am frequently required to create scripts to retrieve particular  information about users from Active Directory.  Here are some useful AD attributes for you to use in your scripts.

• DisplayName
• cn – Common Name
• mail = email address
• c = Country
• homephone = no explanation needed here
• l =  City
• mobile
• postalCode = post code
• st = State
• streetAddress
• telephoneNumber = Office number
• whenCreated – the day the object was created

There certainly are more but for me these are the main ones for the reports I use.

Since upgrading one of my domain controllers to Windows 2008 I had noticed a couple of errors related to VSS around the normal backup times, so I decided to investigate these. The primary message I was receiving was:

Backup started at ‘dd/mm/yyyy time’ failed with the following error code ‘2155348237′ (Enumeration of files failed.). Please rerun backup once issues resolved.

This error message does not help you locate the issue at all. The backup log files in c:\windows\logs\WindowsServerBackup were empty as well. So no help at all.

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Recently while testing an upgrade to Microsoft Exchange 2007 in a virtual test environment I got an error message. You know one of those error messages that Microsoft has a really wacky cause for. In this particular case the error message was:

“The FSMO role ownership could not be verified because its directory partition has not replicated successfully with at least one replication partner.”

That error message looks detailed enough, doesn’t it. It is obviously associated with Active Directory. Here is the Microsoft answer to the problem.

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The latest versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader have seemed to have introduced an annoying bug. When you open a PDF attachment from Microsoft Outlook 2003 after about 5 seconds an error appears and closes Acrobat Reader.

“Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error!” or some variation of it.

The problem is associated with folder redirection in the user profile. In the basic testing I did it seemed to fail if any folder was redirected.

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