Hi All

Interested in finding out a little information about the new Windows 7 operating system. Check out these video’s from Microsoft. Most people will find the first video very interesting. This is where they talk about the new user interface and some real nice tips & tricks. The other video’s will be of more interest to IT support people. All worth reviewing especially to see the new features that will be supported by Server 2008 R2.

Server 2008 R2 is also in Release Candidate stage at the moment and should be released around the same time as Windows 7 (22 October).

Want to know what you pc gets up to when you logon to the network at work ? Well so did I and here is what I found. To get a real good picture of how the logon process works we need to take a look at what the computer will do the first time it is added to an Active Directory domain. So lets start there.

The first time you start up the computer It will receive information about your network. A very important part of this information is the location of a DNS server. Because this computer is new to the domain it will not have any idea of what servers it can use to logon to the domain with. So to find out the computer sends a query out to your DNS server asking for SRV records. These SRV records tell the computer what servers are run Active Directory. The DNS server also returns the IP address (HOST record) for each domain controller. Now that the computer knows who it can talk to it sends out a request to all the domain controllers. You can think of this as a simple Hi there message. The first domain controller that responds to this request will then look at the IP address for the computer. From the IP the domain controller can tell the computer what Active Directory Site it is part of. The computer then saves the site name in the registry. Once again the computer will ask the DNS server for all the Active Directory servers, But this time the computer is only interested in servers in the same site as the computer. The computer receives the list and again sends out a Hi there type of message. This time the first Domain Controller to respond will be used to authenticate the computer with Active Directory. This allows the computer access to network.

From now on the computer will always try to authenticate with the same server. If for some reason the server is not there the computer will start the process above all over again. There is also the chance that the computer may be moved to another site. If this happens the computer will start-up and try to authenticate with its normal server but this time the server will tell the computer that it has moved sites. From there the computer will use DNS to find a list of servers in the same site and authenticate with them.

Hi All

Hopefully some of you managed to join the GTD #Tweekly that I mentioned in the post before this one. If not don’t worry read on to see what we went through.

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