Configure NTP Service in your enterprise domain

Applies to : Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016

I was asked to help a client who recently created new domain controllers and removed the old ones. It included transfer of FSMO roles too. They were few issues which they were facing.

1. All clients were getting different time zones.

2. Event IDs 50 on PDC [The time service detected a time difference of greater than…]

3. Authentication was stopped for some sites.

When I looked events on PDC, then I found that root cause. NTP settings was not defined properly due to which all these issues were there. It happened because they transferred PDC role from old DCT to new DCT. Here are the steps which I followed and it was fixed after that.

SVCHOST.exe is utilizing 100% CPU

Sometimes we notice all of sudden 100% hike in CPU utilization on a server and finds "Svchost.exe" as a culprit. But this executable doesn't give much information what is it running or what is it using. There are few tricks to troubleshoot the problem but before i would like to tell you about "Svchost.exe" in brief.
"Svchost" stands for "Service Host". It is an executable for those services and applications which has only .dll files. Like, W32Time, Dhcp, Dnscache, EventLog, Themes, etc,. It means that it is very important executable to run these critical services.

PowerShell: Find all group policies as per the required string

Sometimes it happens when you are asked to check all group policies which has a particular settings. There could be many reasons for the same, like need to change the setting globally, or remove the setting. When you start working on it, you see thousands of group policies to check and make the changes.

Making change in the policy is not time consuming but to find all policy on which you need to make this change is really complicated and too time consuming.

Being a powershell lover, i created a script which will help you to get the list of all GPOs as per your passed string and its status whether it is linked or not.