he most practical means of configuring disk quotas on a large scale would be through a domain-level group policy.

This will configure the settings automatically on any of the volumes you wish to have disk quotas enabled, saving you the need to have to configure each volume independently. Open the Group Policy Object Editor (gpedit.msc) and navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Disk Quotas. On the right hand pane you will see a list of policies that can be applied. Double click the Default Quota Limit and Warning Level Properties setting.

Figure 1: The Default Quota Limit and Warning Level Properties Dialog The default quota limit is the maximum amount of space assigned per default quota, whereas the warning level is the amount of space at which a warning is triggered. Normally 90-95% of the total value is a good limit to set as a warning. Now configure any other settings you wish to be applied by selecting them from the right hand pane. To have your changes applied immediately you can enable the Disk Quota Policy Processing policy and choose Process Even If The Group Policy Objects Have Not Changed from Administrative Templates > System > Group Policy.

Figure 2: The Disk Quota Policy Processing Dialog You may also want to manually force a group policy update using the gpupdate utility. Simply go to Start > Run and type gpupdate followed by the return key. This will refresh both the computer and user policies. Whatever changes you make in the group policy will be reflected on the Quota properties tab of each volume you wish to configure in your domain. The options will appear grayed out and non-editable.

Configuring Disk Quotas and Disk Quota Entries

Using the Computer Management console, you can configure disk quotas for a local or remote volume from a central location. To open Computer Management, you have three choices; either right click My Computer and select Manage, type compmgmt.msc in the Run bar or select Computer Management from the Administrative Tools folder. Select which computer you wish to manage from the root node. To select a remote machine right click the Computer Management node, select Connect to another computer and choose the computer you wish to manage. Now, navigate to Storage > Disk Management and select the volume you want to configure from the right hand pane and open the properties dialog. Click the Quota tab and enable the options you want to be enforced.

Figure 3: The Disk Quota Properties Dialog The traffic lights icon at the top indicate the status of the disk quota; red means quotas are disabled, orange signifies a changeover is taking place (while it rebuilds the disk information), and green means disk quotas are enabled. A textual representation of the status is shown on the right of the image. Check Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit to have Windows restrict users from adding more data to their allocated disk space when the quota limit has been reached. Users will be unable to add more data until some space is freed up. As you can see from Figure 3 above, the quota limit for new users is greyed out. This is because we have already set it from the group policy, which overrides any customizable settings on the quota tab of a volume. In this case we have limited the users disk space to 500MB and set a warning level to 450MB. You may choose not to limit disk usage and just enable quotas to track disk space usage on a per volume basis by leaving the Deny disk space to users exceeding quota limit checkbox unchecked and logging a warning when a user exceeds the warning level defined as part of the quota limit. Whenever a user exceeds this limit a Warning event log will be written to the Application Event Log and shown in the Event Viewer.

Figure 4: A warning event log for disk quotas As per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915182 there is a known issue in the pre service pack version of Windows 2003 in that the Warning event log is incorrectly shown as an Information log in Event Viewer. In the Quota Entries application however, it is correctly displayed as a Warning. When you press the Apply button on the Disk Quota Properties Dialog you are notified that the volume will be rescanned to update the statistics and that this operation may take several minutes. Simply press OK to continue and have disk quotas enabled on that volume.

Quota Entries
Click the Quota Entries button on the Disk Quota Properties Dialog to view a list of individual disk quota entries. From this section you can create, delete and manage quota entries for specific users or groups. If a user requires more space than others then you can set this from here. Go to Quota > New Quota Entry and the Active Directory User Picker will appear. Choose a user from Active Directory and press OK. You will be given the option to limit disk space and set a warning level or not limit disk usage at all.

Figure 5: Adding a new quota entry Once you have chosen your preferred settings, press OK and the user will be added to the list. You can monitor a users disk usage by looking at the properties of each of the columns. Status indicates whether the user is within their limit, if a warning has been logged or if the limit has been exceeded; the icon will change accordingly.

Figure 6: Viewing a list of Quota Entries

. Installing DNS on Windows Server 2003: If using the new style Start menu: Click on "Start", "Control Panel", "Add or Remove Programs" and select the "Add/Remove Windows Components" tab on the left-hand side. If using the "Classic" style Start menu: Click on "Start", "Settings", "Control Panel", "Add or Remove Programs" and select the "Add/Remove Windows Components" tab on the left-hand side. In the "Windows Components Wizard", highlight the "Networking Services" and press

the "Details" button. The screen below will be displayed (Fig 1).

Figure 1 - The Application Server Screen Then, check "Domain Name System (DNS)" as shown in Figure 2 below and click "OK" to close each window and "Next" to install DNS. You will be asked to insert your Windows Server 2003 disk. Click "Finish" once the installation is complete.

Figure 2 - The Networking Services Screen You have now installed DNS.

Figure 3 - Where to find the IIS Manager 2. Where to find the DNS Manager: If you are using the new style Start menu, you can reach the Internet Information Services console by clicking "Start", "Administrative Tools" and selecting "DNS" from the list in figure 3 above. If you are using the "Classic" style Start Menu, you can reach the console by clicking "Start", "Programs", "Administrative Tools" and select "DNS" from the list in figure 3 above.

Figure 4 - Select Configuration Action 3. Configure your DNS Server: Right-click on your server name in the list on the left-hand pane and select "Configure a Server". The "Configure a DNS Server" Wizard will start. Click "Next". On the "Select Configuration Action" screen (shown in Figure 4 above) select "Create a forward lookup zone (recommended for small networks)" and press "Next".

Figure 5 - Adding a new "Zone" 4. Adding a new "Zone": Simply enter the name of a suitable domain which you intend to use internally. I am going to use my own domain and add appropriately named "subdomains" to access internal network resources. For example, to access my Intranet, I will enter http://intranet.simongibson.com where "intranet" is the subdomain.

Figure 6 - The Zone File 5. The Zone File: DNS information is stored in a file within the system32 folder. The "Zone File" screen simply gives you the opportunity to use an existing backup file or create a fresh one. In our case, we will simply create a fresh file. Press "Next".

Figure 7 - Dynamic Update 6. Dynamic Update: As my server is not part of a Directory I am going to opt not to allow dynamic updates as shown in Figure 7 above. Press "Next".

Figure 8 - Adding Forwarders 7. Forwarders: Forwarders will allow non simongibson.com requests to be answered by other DNS Servers. In this case, I have entered the IP addresses for my ISP's DNS Servers so I can still browse the Internet. Only simongibson.com requests will be answered by our internal DNS Server, everything else will be answered by the external DNS servers shown in Figure 8 above. To complete the "Configure a DNS Server" wizard, click "Next" and "Finish".

Figure 9 - Adding a new Host 8. Adding a new Host: Now that our DNS Server is operational, we need to add a Host name. As I have set up IIS to use "Host Headers" I need to create an entry for my Intranet (see IIS6 tutorial here). This is going to be intranet.simongibson.com. To add the new Host, right-click in the white space in the pane on the right and select "New Host (A)..." from the menu that appears (as shown in Figure 9 above). In my case, my website is hosted externally so I will need to add another Host called "www" which will point at the IP of the web server on which it is hosted. I will also need to do the same for my email by adding a "mail" host.

Figure 10 - The New Host 9. The New Host: As illustrated in Figure 10 above, type the subdomain name into the upper box and the IP address it should forward to (in this case, the web server) in the lower box. Then press the "Add Host" button. A message will then appear indicating if the new host was successfully added after which you can either add more hosts or press "Done" to close the "New Host" screen.

Figure 11 - Configuring your client PCs (Windows XP) 10. Configuring your client PCs (Windows XP): To configure your client PCs to use the new DNS Server you will need to make a change to their network settings. To do this, right-click on "My Network Places" and select "Properties". Then, rightclick on "Local Area Connection" and select "Properties". Select "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" from the list and click "Properties". The screen shown in figure 11 will be shown. Ensure that the "Use the following DNS server addresses" radio button is selected and enter the IP address of your new DNS Server into the "Preferred DNS Server" box and press "OK". The client PC will now use your new DNS Server. Alternatively, where you have access to a DHCP server, you can configure it to issue the IP address of the new DNS server to all your client PCs automatically. This is the preferred method of assigning a DNS server and the method I use in my internal network. Win