I received the following error message when using the vSphere Client to cold migrate a VMware guest running on ESX 3.0.2 to a new datastore : Incompatible device specified for device ’0′ The migration failed at 99%. VMware KB 9105247 suggested the problem was an attached .ISO image file. No .ISOs were showing as [...]
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I needed to count the number of files in a directory on a Windows 2003 server. Here’s the command that can easily be scripted: dir/b/a-d c:\directory | find /v /c “::” You can also specify a file share instead of a directory name: dir/b/a-d \\server\share | find /v /c “::” If you want to count the number [...]
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You can use vmware-cmd to shut down a VMware guest. The syntax is [sourcecode language="perl"] vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/guest1/guest1.vmx stop [/sourcecode] Powering off a VM guest is often part of a larger script, so I need to know when the guest is really down before executing the remainder of my script. The following code checks the guest’s state using [...]
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I received the following message today when trying to delete a computer object from Active Directory: Object %COMPUTERNAME% is a container and contains other objects. Are you sure you want to delete object %COMPUTERNAME% and the objects it contains? This operation could take a long time if %COMPUTERNAME% contains a large number of objects. To determine which sub-objects this [...]
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I received the following generic popup message when installing a new instance on SQL 2005 SP3 cluster running on Windows Server 2003 R2: There was an unexpected failure during the setup wizard. The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled, or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. The active [...]
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A new Windows 2003 R2 server was not automatically registering itself in DNS despite having “Register this connection’s addresses in DNS” selected. Performing an ipconfig /registerdns resulted in a “RPC server unavailable” error message. The solution was to temporarily enable the DHCP Client service, which we disable as a part of our server build [...]
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We have a security appliance that manages user passwords. One feature of this appliance is it can initiate a RDP session to a Windows box and pass the user’s credentials for authentication, which allows the users to access the remote system without knowing their password. This appliance uses the Remote Desktop Web Connection ActiveX control, and [...]
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I was performing a security audit on a Windows 2003 member server that had many local user accounts. One of my tasks was to identify which accounts had passwords that never expire. I decided to use WMIC to enumerate the user accounts. The command I executed was: wmic path Win32_UserAccount where PasswordExpires=”false” Many accounts were [...]
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Microsoft had released the out of band patch to resolve Internet Explorer vulnerabilities, see KB978207 and MS10-002 for additional details. The patches for IE6, IE7, and IE8 are available on Windows Update and Microsoft Update. Unfortunately for me, our business proxy blocks access to these sites. We also have to go through a corporate vulnerability rating process, [...]
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