The following script can be run against remote Windows machines, and will enumerate the contents of the remote server’s local administrators group. It requires Sysinternals PSExec utility, and must be run with administrative credentials. Set the four paths to the correct locations for your workstation. REM set path to PSexec on machine the script is […]
by File in: Fixes
Things didn’t go too smoothly yesterday when I was trying to reconfigure our SQL 2005 cluster and it’s database locations. At one point, I couldn’t even get SQL Configuration Manager to start up. At various times I received both of the following errors. The request failed or the service did not respond in a timely […]
I’m finalizing a Windows 2003 R2 build that will become our gold image, which will be the source of all new server deployments within our organization. One challenge I had to overcome was getting the CD-ROM/DVD drive to be set to drive Z: after the syspreped image is cloned and booted. Many people are familiar with changing […]
Last night I converted a physical Windows 2003 R2 server to a VMware virtual machine using VMware Converter Standalone version 4.0.1. The entire process was extremely simple, only four steps. After the P2V conversion completed, the physical machine powered off, and the newly created VM booted up. Everything appeared to be normal, until I realized […]
Here’s a quick and easy way of checking how long a Windows server or workstation has been up, via the command line. It pipes the results of Net Statistics Workstation into find. Run the following from a command prompt: net statistics workstation | find /i “statistics since” The results will look like Statistics since MM/DD/YYYY […]
by File in: Windows
I brought up a snapshot of a Windows Server 2003 R2 guest today and could not login to the domain. After further review I found the server had lost its static TCP/IP settings – both NICs were set to DHCP (they had previously been statically set). When I attempted to add the TCP/IP addresses back to […]
To delegate the ability to enable and disable user accounts in Active Directory: Launch Active Directory Users and Computers with administrative credentials Right click on the OU where you want to delegate the ability to enable and disable user accounts Select the Active Directory security group that you want to delegate the ability to and […]
To export a list of all computers and non domain controller servers in an Active Directory OU, use dsquery.exe. For example, to export all computers in mydomain.com’s servers OU to machines.txt : DSQUERY COMPUTER “OU=servers,DC=mydomain,DC=com” -o rdn -limit 1000 > c:\machines.txt Use -limit when you want to return more than the default 100 results. Note that […]
Today when I established a telnet session to a host on port 80 from my Windows XP machine, I was unable to see any commands I typed echoed on the screen. I knew I had to enable local echo, but always seem to forget how to do it. KB196748 describes how to enable local echo […]
by File in: Utilities
I’ve written in the past about how to extract MSI files at the Windows command prompt, and how to extract the .msi files and edit them using UniExtract and Orca. I think I now have a new favorite tool for extracting .MSI files, and it’s called Less MSIerables (lessmsi) by Scott Willeke. It can be […]
