Securing Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory
According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2008 is the most secure Windows server version ever. Windows 2008 does include many features that will help increase overall security of the OS, or assist you with securing AD, the network, etc. Most of the features/roles available in Windows 2008 are not being installed in a default installation of […]
Using custom/non-Performance Counter data to build graphs in Operations Manager 2007
It is pretty easy to use data collected by Performance monitors in Counter objects within OpsMgr 2007. You can create graphs, create rules/monitors alerts, etc But you can do the same with any type of information that can be gathered by e.g. a vbs vbscript Suppose you want to monitor the number of files in […]
Monitoring disk space utilization growth/increase with Operations Manager 2007
By default, Microsoft Operations Manager includes some monitors / rules that have the ability to monitor the disk utilization of system and/or data disks of your servers (and clients). This is a really nice feature, however there may be reasons why this kind of monitoring would still leave you one step behind of your users. […]
Add ‘Command Prompt Here’ when you right-click in Explorer
Open your favourite registry editor (regedit will do just fine) Go to “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT” Locate the “Folder” key Open the “shell” branch Create a new key called “Command Prompt Here” Open this key and create a new key called “command” Open “command” and double click the “default” entry (REG_SZ) Type the following : cmd.exe /k pushd […]
Creating empty VMWare .vmdk files
Having empty vmdk files allows you to – create virtual machines even with vmware player – create additional disks and add them to existing vmware installations The easiest way to create custom vmdk ‘disks’ is by using a free online tool called “EasyVMX” (http://www.easyvmx.com) Use EasyVMX version 2 to create a virtual machine : http://www.easyvmx.com/new-easyvmx.shtml […]
IP Autotuning in Vista
At any given time, the amount that TCP can send is governed by three factors: the congestion window, the receive window and the number of bytes available to send. Without using TCP window scaling (which is disabled by default in previous versions of Windows), the maximum receive window a receiver can advertise is 64K bytes. […]
System/Disk Backup in Vista using command line script
Microsoft has implemented a really neat feature in Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate, allowing you to perform a full disk or even system backup, while the system is running. This new backup tool used Block Level backup and uses Volume Shadow Copy to backup open files (however, it is advised to close your applications while […]
Open a command prompt with system rights in Vista (and XP)
First of all, download psexec from the Microsoft website. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/psexec.mspx From and elevated/admin command prompt (cmd.exe, “run as administrator”), run psexec –s cmd.exe C:\>whoami peter C:\>psexec -s cmd.exe PsExec v1.83 – Execute processes remotely Copyright (C) 2001-2007 Mark Russinovich Sysinternals – www.sysinternals.com Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6000] Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All […]
Run explorer window with administrator rights in Vista
Easy, don’t you think ? Right click explorer(.exe), choose “run as administrator” and you’re set ? Nope – doesn’t work ! And this is why The UAC (User Account Control) feature in Vista provides a user with two tokens when he logs on… a token that is bound to his real user rights, […]
Enable incoming icmp (ping) in Vista
By default, Vista has the Windows Firewall is turned on. This means that all incoming connections are being blocked. This may be a good thing in certain cases, but not restrictive enough in most cases, because all outgoing traffic would be allowed, so either additional rules need to be set up, or Windows Firewall should […]
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