Welcome to AD Troubleshooting!

Hi everyone,

My name is Sean Deuby and I’m a Directory Services MVP (and contributing editor here), which means I’m an Active Directory geek. I created the Active Directory Troubleshooting blog last year, and with the redesign of the Windows IT Pro website, the gang in Loveland has graciously offered me my own little corner of their shiny new online portal. We're taking pains to make sure you can still reach the new blog location via the old http://adtroubleshooting.deuby.com URL. For the benefit of Windows IT Pro's readers I'll be republishing the blog's posts here so we have everything in one place. For the five of you that were subscribed to the site before, I apologize for the inconvenience :).

I’ve worked with Active Directory since its beta days.  I wrote a book about it when it was first released (Well, technically it was about Windows 2000 Server in general, but mainly it was on Active Directory), and since then I've spent almost 10 years working with it at Intel and speaking and writing about it. Why did I create this blog? To help make the AD administrator’s job just a little bit easier. AD is one of Microsoft’s most complicated infrastructure systems. To me, this means three things: 

Microsoft research has shown the majority of IT professionals are not full time in any one specialty; most of them are generalists that must peanut-butter themselves across a wide range of IT support areas. In other words, they're a mile wide and an inch deep. That means that most of you out there don’t have the time (or the desire, though I can’t understand why) to be Active Directory experts. As a result, you leave AD alone as long as it works. Since it works well most of the time, there are (hopefully) long intervals between your troubleshooting sessions, and you get rusty.

Which brings me back to this blog. It has several purposes. The first is to share AD tips and tricks I've picked up over the years; maybe they'll save you a little time or help you catch a bad situation before it gets worse..

The second, should you choose to participate, is to send me your favorite tips and tricks in AD troubleshooting. Y'all (yes, I live in Texas) collectively have a vast amount of AD knowledge - why not share it with your colleagues? Send me a suggestion to sdeuby at windowsitpro.com, you'll get your name in lights, and everyone will enjoy your pearls of wisdom!

The third purpose is to provide a home location to find my Active Directory troubleshooting flowcharts and your comments to help me improve them. I'll tell you more about these in the next coupleof posts.