Server installation and client access

 A colleague called me yesterday evening and told me about a problem he encountered at a client site where he was doing a server deployment. The problem was that after installing a server 2008 and joining it to an existing domain, he could not access the server from a client system even though the user account was a pre-existing administrator's account.
My Solution
He needs to find out what group the user in question belong to and what policies are in place for that group.
1. A quick way to find out  is to start the server and run dsa.msc. this will open the active directory users and computers.
2. Click on the users' folder under the domain and this should open all the user groups (if users have been added to a group) or all the users will just be listed.
3. Right click on the user account and click on Properties
4. On the User Property dialog box, you should see Member Of as one of the tabs in the User Property dialog box. All the groups the user belongs to will be displayed when you click on the Member Of dialog box.
5. You can write out all the group the user belong to and move on to the next step.
6. Open the RUN function from the start menu and type gpmc.msc, this will open the group policy settings
7. Click on the Forest >> Domain >> Domain you are working in
8. Right click on the default domain policy and click edit
9. Under Computer Configuration, click on Policies >> Windows Settings >> Security Settings >>
10. Click on Local Policies >> User Rights
This should open all the User Right Policies that have been defined. You might need to go through each one to  see what policies have been defined for the group which your user belongs to or the policies defined for the user himself.
Emphasis should be on the Allow Log on locally and Deny Log on locally.

I hope this will solve the problem.

Defragmentation

For those of you using an older computer with outdated hardware, software, or both, there is an optimization you can perform that may speed up your computer (depending on many factors). What I’m going to be talking about today is “defragmenting your hard drive”. Defragmenting your hard drive basically consolidates the data on the hard drive itself so it may be accessed in an efficient way.

Hard drives store your data in something called a sector. Each sector can hold a fixed amount of data. In today’s market, hard drives contain well over 300 million sectors (it really depends on the size of your drive). The hard drive has what you could call an “arm” whose job is to read data from the disk’s surface (also called a “platter”). While the platters contain the data, their job is to spin; the arm is the component that actually facilitates reading/writing. Considering that the hard drive has so many moving parts and is the slowest component in a machine, it’s very important to keep it running efficiently if you want to achieve maximum performance from it.

Over time, your data on the hard drive’s platters can become scattered or “fragmented”. When this happens, the hard drive’s arm moves all over the place to access your data. If it was in one consolidated location that could be accessed sequentially, the hard drive’s arm wouldn’t have to move much. This excessive movement (also called “seeking”) translates into decreased performance and increased wear and tear. The faster your hard drive can seek to read/write data, the faster the data can be transferred and processed by other components in the computer.

Defragmenting your hard drive is very easy. All you need to do is open “My Computer”, right-click on the drive you wish you defragment and choose “Properties”. Afterwards, there should be a tab at the top called “Tools”; click on that. You will now see a section about defragmenting and a button to start defragmenting the drive. Depending on the operating system you’re running, you may have a choice between analyzing the disk, defragmenting the disk, or just defragmenting the disk. If you choose to analyze the disk, it will tell you how badly the drive is fragmented and if you should defragment it or not. After choosing to defragment your disk, there’s nothing else to do other than waiting until it’s finished. Depending on your hardware, operating system, and disk’s density/speed, it could take a little while. If your drive was excessively fragmented before, you should notice a significant increase in performance/responsiveness.