The general saying these days is that the economy is in a bad shape, things are tight and it is becoming increasingly difficult to make payroll. For small business owners, this is evident in the rate at which employees are being laid off, or having their hours reduced. The danger in all this is that cost cutting may be taken to such an extreme level that it is bound to affect productivity in the long run. I remember working very hard to convince a friend of mine to be careful about laying off too many good employees. “Why?” he asked, and my response was, what are you going to do if the work starts coming in and you do not have experienced people to get it out the door efficiently and profitably?
Network Infrastructure
Active Directory and Morphed Folders
I recently came across a cool tool from Microsoft called Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner which runs more than 100 checks to help you assess the overall health of your Active Directory and network infrastructure, including the configuration of Active Directory Domain Services, DHCP, DNS, Exchange Server, network adapters, and domain controllers. If the tool detects problems, it links to Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and other Web content for resolution information. I got the tool, installed it and ran it against a client’s network and it exposed some issues in the Active Directory and network environment that could create problems during server deployments, infrastructure upgrades and migrations.
A good example of what the tool found is the exposure of what is called “Morphed Folders” in the domain controllers. Microsoft describes morphed folders as “…folders and files that have replicated to other servers and are exact copies of one another. When the File Replication Service (FRS) cannot determine which of two folders is most recent, it creates a duplicate folder. These folders are named FolderName_NTFRS_GUIDname, where FolderName is the name of the original folder and GUIDname represents a unique GUID for the morphed folder.”