IT

I had seen this a few months ago and promptly lost the link on accident – now that I’ve found it again, I’m spreading the word of the usefulness of this “grand overview” of Active Directory.

Believe it or not, Microsoft actually published an Adobe PDF onto their website, and it’s meant to be printed out on a large format printer. I would have expected it in some type of Office format.

You can download a copy of it here.

ADMX files are 'the new way' to do Group Policies in Vista and Longhorn. Thankfully a large part of the group policy engine was reworked and rewritten for Vista and Longhorn. You can now create a centrally located repository inside of SYSVOL to store all the newer style policies.

If you want to convert older style ADM files to ADMX, or create new ones within a MMC session, download this program here.

Many bugs fixed and hopefully not much broken.
You can read about it here.

By default, Compound TCP is disabled on Vista, but enabled on Longhorn server, unless this changes before Longhorn server ships.
CTCP is a technology that came out of the Microsoft Research group as a way to deal with connections that have a large bandwidth-delay product.
A good example of this kind of connection would be satellite internet (DirectPC / Starband) or wireless technology like EVDO or WiMax.

To enable CTCP on Vista, run 'netsh interface tcp set global congestionprovider=ctcp'.
To disable CTCP on Vista, run 'netsh interface tcp set global congestionprovider=none'.

If you are going to use CTCP on a lossy connection that might have packets come back out of order, you might also want to enable RFC 1323 timestamps, unless you are on a very low bandwidth connection. You can do that by running 'netsh interface tcp set global timestamps=enabled'.

For a list of the global TCP settings under Vista (and Longhorn), launch a command prompt and then run 'netsh interface tcp show global'.

You could almost think of the tunable settings in 'netsh interface tcp' much like the tunable settings under /proc/net/ipv4 in Linux.

A good writeup on CTCP can be found here.

Information about the new TCP/IP stack in Vista/Longhorn can be found here.

For a real world example, with CTCP enabled, I can saturate a cellphone data connection (1xRTT or EVDO) and have smoother performance overall. I suspect I'd notice a bigger change if the connection was EVDO Rev A compared to EVDO Rev 0.