If you're looking for an easy online storage solution for Windows (and have a gmail account kicking around), check out the Gmail Drive by bjarke. It's a free shell extension for Windows that basically adds a new drive to your computer. When you try to access the drive through Windows explorer, you are prompted for your gmail login details (you have the option of saving the details to avoid having to login each time you access the drive)…

One of our techs recently ran across a problem with a new Windows Vista Business laptop trying to synchronize offline files to a Windows Server 2000 file server. Synchronization would start, but the Sync Center in Vista would show failures for every single file that was attempted to be sync'd. The error message read something to the extent of "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process". We tried the usual: checking permissions on the folders being offline'd (I know that's probably not a word, but you get what I mean); deleting his local cache of Offline Files; disabling and then re-enabling Offline Files. But we just kept on banging our heads against the same error. At first, just about any web search for the error resulted in either something about Windows Home Server or databases or something of the like. Eventually, though, we struck gold: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296264/en-us: Configuring opportunistic locking in Windows…

We'll start off with Inactive accounts first, and then work on the disabled accounts after that. Active Directory in Server 2003 has a nice user/computer attribute called lastLogonTimeStamp that can help us keep track of inactive accounts. If you have ever tried to use that attribute, however, you might have come up with something like this…

Part I demonstrated how to find aged or inactive accounts, and in Part II we will look at another lingering account type: disabled accounts. Like inactive accounts, Directory Searchers also come in handy for disabled accounts. We can also, however, read an Active Directory account's status directly from a hidden attribute on the ADSI object. Let's start with the Directory Searcher method. This entry also draws from Bahram’s Blog. The code: $adobjroot = [adsi]'' $objdisabsearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($adobjroot) $objdisabsearcher.filter = "(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2))" $resultdisabaccn = $objdisabsearcher.findall() | sort path…