I spent Sunday afternoon (yes it was 10 degrees where i’m at), reading an ebook from netpro. This is a six chapter series on Active Directory Troubleshooting. Good read for those who are doing server admin with Active Directory. This ebook targets windows 2000 active directory but apply’s to Windows 2003 as well. My favorite chapter was #4, this chapter covers performance counters to use to help tune and monitor AD along with server counters. http://www.netpro.com/ebook/index.cfm is the homepage These are free however you have to register. I’d highly recommend anyone to download this good resource.
Secondly, download the Windows 2003 server resource kit. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en The resource kit is rich in utilities, one of my favorite is called getmac, this gets the MAC address of remote machines, you can even pass credentials. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/reskit/resourcekit.mspx has more info also (IIS 6 resource kit!).
Lastly this is my favorite geek toy of the month! Microsoft released Services for Unix 3.5 recently w/o an license restrictions or cost. Download today at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/downloads/default.asp