So yesterday we were setting up a trust between my domain and another domain. Both were Windows Server 2003.

In prinicipal this is a very easy task but sometimes you get the most interesting error messages.

Like this one.

The specified user already exists

After googling for a while we ended up with no real answer. A lot of maybes and pointers to search in a certain direction.

In the end we found the problem there was a computer on the other domain that had the same NetBIOS name than my domain. Removing that computer (user) f...

This is a bad one if you are running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 with Internet Explorer. If you are running Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 then you are not affected

The bad part about this is that all it takes for you is to visit a bad site. If you are using Chrome (like me), FireFox or Safari then you are not affected by this. Microsoft really should redesign IE from scratch and get rid of all that ActiveX baggage/nonsense, it is not worth it, it only causes troubles. Almost every IE vulnerability is ActiveX based.

Mitigating Fa...

One of my Windows Server 2003 R2 boxes started showing CPU bumps of 0 to 10% late last night. In investigating this a process cidaemon.exe was found to be the process causing the small but consistent utilization.

This process is associated with full text indexing on Windows. Even if you don't use full text indexing, Windows does. I found 3 catalogs setup on the server. One of the defaults being the system volume. Repeated attempts to configure full text indexing and fix the wild CPU usage all failed. The only way I was able to fix this problem was the delete the catalogs and r...