Day Seven: Test Environment is working

Well I finally got the test environment up and running. Had a little trouble because I forgot to change the SID on one of my VM machines. I took a shortcut and copied the VM machine folder instead of reinstalling windows 3 times. This of course caused trust issues with the domain since all the workstations had the same SID. Symptoms of this phenomenon include not being able to login to the domain on the workstation, and the domain administrators group not being included in the Local Administrators group of the workstation. The quickest way to resolve this is to move the machine back into a workgroup, Reboot, Run NewSID (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/NewSid.mspx), Rejoin the domain, Reboot (again), and try to login using a domain account.

Sidenote: NewSID is an excellent tool developed by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell. It’s an interesting fact that Microsoft does not actually support the use of NewSID despite is availability from the Microsoft website. This is due to the fact that NewSID was developed by Mark and Bryce under their own company, Winternals. Microsoft bought them up and allowed them to rerelease their tools on Microsoft Technet with the disclaimer that it is not actually supported by Microsoft. Personally, I’ve used NewSID quite a bit and have never had an issue. However, if you wish to do things the right way, then Microsoft recommends running Sysprep. This tool will actually do lot more then generate a new random SID, so I’d advise just using NewSID.

Back to SMS and my test environment. Tomorrow I plan to apply SP2 to SMS and install the first revision of ITMU to accurately reflect the production environment. A quick patch update test should show everything working the same as it does in production. Then apply ITMU ver. 3 and another update test. If all goes well, I’ll be updating ITMU on the production server real soon.