Mark your calendars

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I'm going to be presenting at the Iowa Association for Communication Technology annual conference on April 1 in Cedar Rapids. It's a joint conference with the Iowa Distance Learning Association. My co-worker Aaron Howard and I will be covering the evolution of our campus wireless network over the last 5 years, as well as the security and usability implications of various wireless security methods in the chaotic campus network environment.

"Network path not found" when attempting to join a machine to a domain

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I'm feeding this into Google, in case anyone else ever runs into this problem that I helped someone fix with their domain this week: If you have taken down one domain controller for maintenance, and then you attempt to add it back into your domain after a rebuild, and you encounter the error "Network path not found", you have a problem. This error usually means that you have some sort of DNS problem, but if you double-check all your TCP/IP settings, and find that's not the case, there's one more thing to check.

Check to make sure someone hasn't disabled File and Printer sharing on your "backup" domain controller. Without that enabled, Active Directory will NOT function properly. Go into the Network control panel, re-enable that protocol, and you're in business.

I know, this is a pretty obscure problem, and most people wouldn't accidentally disable file and print sharing on a domain controller, but it's possible (and baffling at first) so that's why I'm sharing.