Steve Wiseman :: IntelliAdmin - Remote Administration For Windows

Network Administrator – Beta 3

Posted by Steve Wiseman on September 30, 2009 with 0 Comments

Network Administrator Beta 3 has been released. If you never have used it before, Network Administrator allows you to perform actions on any number of machines across your network. You can reboot 100 computers with the press of a button, disable USB flash drives, or set Microsoft Word to save in 2003 format. These are just a few of things you can do with it.

You can get a copy of the beta from here:

Network Administrator Beta 3

If you purchase 2.9 today, you will get 3.0 free when it is released on October 27th – Best of all, you get it for 50% off as a regular reader of my blog. Just use this special link when ordering:

Purchase Today

In the 3.0 we have built a core system that supports plugins. This allows us to now add new actions quickly. Last time I spoke about the beta I promised 10 new plugins (in addition to the standard list of actions in 2.9) would be added before the final release.

So far we have added 4 of them. Here they are:

Mass Folder Copy – This plugin allows you to pick a folder on your hard drive, and copy it to many machines across your network. Perfect way to copy a set of shortcuts to everyone’s desktop.

Offline Files Disabler – Disables the annoying offline files setting in Windows XP, and 2003.

Logon Disclaimer – Allows you to set a logon disclaimer that is displayed to a user before they login.

Wallpaper Set – You can set a common background wallpaper image, and set options such as tile, stretch, and center.

All of these have been suggested by beta testers. We have had other great ones, like resetting the local admin password, or pushing out MSI files silently. We are still working on the remote execution engine, and once that is complete we will be able to implement some of those ideas. Get your suggestion in by mailing us at plugins@intelliadmin.com We cannot answer all of the emails sent, but we do read them all.

Give it a spin, and let us know what you think.

Filed Under: Network Administrator, Tools, Utility, Windows

Free Tool – Suspend from the command line

Posted by Steve Wiseman on September 22, 2009 with 5 Comments

I have a system task schedule that wakes up my system at night, runs a few backup processes…and then shuts the computer down.

What I really wanted it to do was to suspend, or hibernate. That way I can get back into my computer quick when I come back in the morning.

After searching around, I found that this little VB Script command can be used to suspend a computer:

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run "RunDll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState"

Unfortunately this does not work on all versions of Windows. For my task, I wanted something I could use on anything from Windows 2000, to the 64 bit version of Windows 7.

After many fruitless searches on Google, I had the IntelliAdmin team build one for me.

It is called System Suspend, and you can download it from here: SystemSuspend.exe

If you run the program with no options, it will immediately suspend the computer. There are two optional arguments you can use when calling it:

/Hibernate:[TRUE|FALSE] – Defaults to false. If you set Hibernate to true the computer will totally power off and save the state to disk. If Hibernate is set to false, then the system will go into a low power state that will allow you to resume quickly

/Force:[TRUE|FALSE]- Applications are notified of the suspend/hibernate by default. If you set the force option to true, then it will skip this step and perform the action immediately

We have tested it on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Windows 7, and 2008 – including 64 bit versions…and it works great on all of them.

Filed Under: BAT Files, Tools, Utility, Windows

Get Windows Update on a DVD

Posted by Steve Wiseman on September 16, 2009 with 2 Comments

I was reading an article at PCMag about PatchMateXP. They ~~have~~ had all the patches for XP on one convenient CD.

Unfortunately for PatchMateXP, this breaks a license with Microsoft and they shut themselves down before they got into legal trouble.

This got me thinking – is there a way to get MS Updates on DVD or CD?

My findings were quite interesting.

After tons of digging, I found this Microsoft Knowledge base article: 913086

At that link, Microsoft provides ISO files that contain all of the security updates by month. They update it regularly.

This works fine if you are already patched up, and just need a few months. What if you need all of the patches for Vista, XP, or 2003? That won’t really help.

I dug some more, and I came across a free utility called Offline Update. You can download it from here.

It allows you to create an ISO file with patches for a specific version of Windows. It gets around those pesky legal issues by having you download the patches to generate the ISO file.

To use it, download the package from the above website, and extract it into a folder. In the root directory you will find a program named UpdateGenerator.exe

Launch it, and you will see that it has a simple, but effective interface:

It even includes patches for Office – a nice bonus.

Select the patches you want, and click start.

A command line window will popup and it will download for hours or days, but eventually it will finish.

When it completes, you will find the completed ISO file in the folder named ISO under the root:

Offline Update ISO

In my case it was the 64 bit version of 2003/XP patches.

Want to know the coolest part?

The ISO it builds is more than a collection of patches, it includes a custom program that will automatically install all of them in one shot.

Simply pop your burned DVD into the drive, and a window will show up:

Offline Update Program

Don’t be confused by the list of options, it is just giving you a choice on non-patch items included in the ISO.

If you just want the patches, simply select nothing and click start. It will only install the patches that have not been installed on your system:

That is all there is to it. The program will install all of the patches, reboot, and the system is up to date.

Now, I can burn that ISO, and give it to my friend Brett, since he lives in an Internet dead zone.

This little utility can be a huge time saver. I highly recommend it.

Filed Under: Command Line, ISO, Office, Patches, Windows

Windows XP vs Windows 7 – Who Won?

Posted by Steve Wiseman on September 10, 2009 with 11 Comments

I installed Windows 7 on my ASUS Atom N270

Before I did that, I recorded how long it took to do a few things:

-Copying a 45 MB file over the network
-Boot Time
-Shutdown Time
-Memory used at idle, after startup
-IE Launch time

Then, after I installed Windows 7, I did the same, and recorded how long it took. I was curious to see if Windows 7 was faster or slower than XP.

Keep in mind this is not scientific, but just a simple test I did on my own computer.

Here is what I found:

Boot time under Windows 7 was 22 seconds faster:

Shutdown time under Windows 7 was 20% faster:

What about the time it takes for Internet Explorer to Launch?

Windows 7 was faster there too:

Amazingly the memory usage at idle was less in Windows 7, than in Windows XP. I should do this article again with Vista. I am sure that number in Vista is over 1GB

Another test I did was copying a 45 MB file over my wireless network.

Look at the difference:

This was an amazing result. I had to try it a few times to make sure it was not a mistake. It took Windows XP almost a minute longer to transfer that same file.

Amazing. Windows 7 is faster on all of my tests. Not only has it won this little test, but instead of wanting to remove it after 2 weeks (Like with Vista)…I want to install it on all of my computers!

Filed Under: IE, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP

Network Administrator 3.0 Beta

Posted by Steve Wiseman on September 2, 2009 with 0 Comments

Purchase Network Administrator 2.9 for only $99 per administrator (50% off since you are a reader of my blog), and when it is released you will receive 3.0 Free.
Just follow this special link

We have been hard at work building a new version of Network Administrator, and have been taking many suggestions from you.

Here is a screen shot of the main form:

Network Administrator

The first thing we did was make the actions multi-threaded. Currently the system only works on one machine at a time.

Silly as this sounds, it was due to a limitation in the Remote Registry service with threads – We found a way around this problem.

It means you can reboot all of those computers in record time.

Network Administrator Progress

Plugins, Plugins, and Plugins. It seems kind of crazy that we did not do this earlier, but the current version of Network Administrator does not have any plugin system. It makes it difficult to add new actions. In our redesign we have added a fantastic plugin system:

Network Administrator Plugin Selection

Best of all, when you purchase a license, new plugins will be automatically downloaded to you for maximum plugin goodness

IntelliAdmin Update System

What else will you see in the new version? It depends – on you. What plugins would you like to see in 3.0? We will take the top 10 ideas and put them in the final version. Send your ideas to plugins@intelliadmin.com

If you purchase Network Administrator 2.9 today, you will get 3.0 for free. In addition, since you are a valued reader of my blog – you can get it for half price!

Just follow this link

Want to part of the 3.0 beta program? Then Sign up here – We will release our first public beta in about two weeks.

Filed Under: Beta, Scripts, Windows

Install Windows 7 from a USB Memory Stick

Posted by Steve Wiseman on September 1, 2009 with 5 Comments

About a year ago I purchased a nice little machine from ASUS.
It is an Atom N270:

When I opened the box, the machine was preloaded with Windows XP. It performs well with XP, and has 1 GB ram, and a 160 GB hard drive. A big mistake I made was installing Vista on it – Very slow.

It only took about a week of pain before I switched back.

So, after hearing all of the big excitement over Windows 7, I wanted to see if it was any better, or faster on this less than powerful machine.

A problem with that is that I do not have a USB DVD/CDROM drive right now, and as you can see from the picture – there are no drives built into that machine.

This means I need to install from a bootable USB memory stick.

I was able to do it, and while I was at it I wrote down what I did so you can too.

What you need:

Copy of Windows 7, and A running version of Vista, Windows 7, or 2008, and a Memory Stick that is at least 4GB in size.

Preparing the USB Memory stick

First, the memory stick needs to be prepared. Make sure you don’t have anything important on it since it will be totally erased.

Put your USB disk in the computer, and wait for it to be recognized. Then get to a command line (Make sure you run that as an administrator)

Type:

DISKPART <ENTER>

This will launch the disk partition program. You need to be real careful here since you can blow away partitions and drives of any drive on your system. Start out by listing the current drives on your system

LIST DISK <ENTER>

You should be able to identify your drive from this list:

So looking at the list, I know that DISK 1 is my flash drive. Make sure you properly identify your drive, or risk destroying important data.

Next, lets run the commands that will prepare your drive.

Note that disk1 is what we determined before. If by chance you have a nice fat USB hard drive sitting on your desk and it happens to be disk 1, and not your flash drive – you will erase everything!

Be careful!

Type this into DISKPART:

select disk1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Now your flash drive is bootable.

Copying the Install Disk

Now the disk is bootable. Get your Windows 7 Install disk and copy the entire disk to your flash drive. With my computer, F: was the flash drive, and G: was the DVD ROM drive with the install disk. Copy the files from the command line like this:

xcopy g:\ f:\ /s/e/f

Installing From Flash

Now, reboot and go into your BIOS and make sure it is set to boot from flash devices. I wish I could create a nice tutorial for this but there are so many different BIOS menus it would be difficult. Here is what mine looks like:

So make sure it is the first boot option, and you should be ready to install Windows 7 right from a flash drive. Save your changes, reboot…and install goodness will commence.

So you may be asking. How fast is it? Is it slow as Vista or Better than XP? I will let you know next time

Filed Under: Boot, Flash Drive, Windows, Windows 7

Burn DVDs and CDs from the command line

Posted by Steve Wiseman on August 28, 2009 with 3 Comments

I was installing the Windows 2003 Resource Kit today, and I ran across these two command line programs that come with it:

cdburn.exe
dvdburn.exe

I started poking around, and I realized they both could be used to burn ISO files from the command line.

For a test, I downloaded a random ISO from MSDN, and gave it a spin:

Burn ISO from command line image

Sure enough, it burned the ISO to dvd without issue – and actually it seemed faster than most of the GUI programs I have used in the past.

So what do you need to get this to work for yourself?

1. Download and install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit

2. Once you install, go to the command line and get into this folder:

C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools

3. Then, burn your DVD by using DVDBurn.exe, or burn your CD by using CDBurn.exe. Here are the command line options:

DVDBurn.exe {DVD_DRIVE_LETTER} {ISO_FILE_NAME}

CDBurn.exe {CD_DRIVE_LETTER} {ISO_FILE_NAME}

That is all there is to it. Now..what would make this complete is a way to build an ISO from the command line. Anyone know of a free way to do this?

Filed Under: Burn, ISO, Resource Kit, Windows

Windows 7 – The $admin share

Posted by Steve Wiseman on August 19, 2009 with 6 Comments

I got my shiny new copy of Windows 7 today from MSDN. It became available to MSDN subscribers earlier this week.

If you have access then give it a spin, there are some excellent improvements over Vista.

I installed it today to test some of our software. One issue, that is also in Vista, is that file and printer sharing and the $admin share are disabled out of the box.

This is fine for your computer at home. You don’t want this turned on unless you absolutely need to.

In a corporate environment it is used quite a bit by the likes of Backup Exec, the distribution tool for Kaspersky antivirus, the remote execute tool PSExec from SysInternals, and last but not least our admin tools heavily rely on the admin share too.

The simple fact is if you need to push software remotely, you are going to need access to the $admin share.

This special share is automatically created when Windows is installed, but it is not available unless file and printer sharing is turned on.

Like I said before, this is disabled by default in Windows 7, and unfortunately Microsoft has yet again changed the method to turn it back on. The steps you need to take are now different than the ones you took in Vista.

How do you get it back up and running in Windows 7?

Start by going into the control panel.

Click on “Network and Internet”

Then click on “Network and Sharing Center”

A new window will be displayed. Look on the left side.

See the item that says “Change Advanced Sharing Settings” – Click on it.

Now you are shown different profiles.

The list can change depending on how your system is configured. Windows 7 will determine automatically what profile your network card is using. You may want to enable file and printer sharing on all of them, or limit it to the “Home or Work” profile for higher security.

Expand the profile you want to modify, and scroll down until you see “File and Printer Sharing”

Click on “Turn on file and printer sharing”

Save your changes.

I wish I could say that is all you need to do, but unfortunately you also need to make a registry change.

Open regedit, and drill down to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Under this key you will need to create a new DWORD value called:

LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Set it to 1, and reboot.

Now you can access the $admin share on your Windows 7 machine.

Filed Under: Admin$ share, File and Printer Sharing, Windows, Windows 7

Dell Driver Download Manager – Fail

Posted by Steve Wiseman on August 10, 2009 with 27 Comments

If you are looking to waste lots of your time I suggest you try to download drivers from the Dell website.

I had a friend call me today. He just did a format / reinstall on his Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop and needed drivers.

He said that every time he tried to download from Dell, it didn’t work.

Smugly I thought I would have this problem fixed in 5 minutes flat.

2 hours later I still could not understand why every driver I downloaded turned into this:

Dell Driver Download Failure

Let me take that back. I knew exactly why it looked like that – I needed to have the Dell driver download manager installed. But the big question was, where in the hell was it?

I searched for hours, and finally came across an amusing blog post. The short version is Dell is making the driver manager optional.

Here are some of my favorite comments from it:

1. Currently utterly scuppered by Download manager. Just get rid of it. The basket of download links was useful but now Im currently stuck trying to locate the huge number of dell cookies on my system to remove the one thats stopping me from having a choice in a download. Restarting the browser and repicking the drivers is a pain. The job of downloading drivers has gone from a 5 minute task to 60 minute distraction. Where can I send the bill for my time that the clients are not going to pay ?

2. I wanted to download one driver today. In the past, that would have taken less than 5 minutes. Today, because I clicked on the DM link, it took almost four hours to figure out what happened to my system, fix it, and then get the driver.

I suppose Dell has invested too much in this travesty to discard it. Too bad — it would have been better if you used that time and money to improve the ability to diagnose problems and find solutions rather than complicate the process of downloading.

If nothing else, give us the ability to opt out of DM forever. I do not want to keep seeing the dialog box asking how I want to download files. I never want to use DM.

Also, please be kind to those who have not yet used this thing and warn them it is fundamentally different — and make it eash to opt out if the person makes the unfortunate decision to use it.

3. Can anyone explain how to get the option back to download via the web option? After installing and uninstalling the Dell Driver Download software program, I no longer have the option to download via the web either.

So where did I make my mistake? The download manager is optional, but I could never find a link to download it, nor could I find a way of switching back to download without it.

In that same post I found out that the trick was to delete the Dell cookies from my web browser.

FireFox dell cookies

Then, I went back to the downloads page and picked the standard option:

Dell Driver Download manager

Just look at that window for a moment. See how easy it would be to click that first option? If you did, you are now stuck.

How nice.

When I picked the second option I could then download drivers without any issue.

Still I was curious. Did I miss something? Did I blow past a prompt to install a download manager plugin for FireFox? Or was Dell’s website so inept that it had no working download manager for FireFox?

I cleared the cookies, and started a new download.

I chose the Dell Download Manager option.

Same thing as before. No prompts, no FireFox plugin, I was simply directed to the drivers page.

From that point on there was no way to download a driver without:

1. Digging through my cookies

2. Removing the entries for dell.com

3. Choosing the second option when a download started.

What about IE? I fired up IE for the first time in 3 months and went to the Dell website. I picked the Download manager option.

Sure enough it installs an IE plugin (Requires a 53 MB install of .NET 3.5 – Whoo Hooo!)

So. What is the lesson? Make damn sure you pick that second option the next time you are on Dell’s website.

Update: After more digging I discovered that if you install these two updates from MS you can get it to work under FF:

Microsoft .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1

Microsoft .NET Assistant version 1.1

Still. That is a huge amount of crap you need to wade through to just get some drivers.

Filed Under: Dell, Drivers, FireFox, Windows

Elevate the command prompt in Vista

Posted by Steve Wiseman on August 5, 2009 with 0 Comments

To keep myself from breaking things, or minimize the damage done when I open one of those “Flying Hamster” videos that has a virus hidden in it, I don’t login to Windows as an administrator

When I need to do something that requires admin access, I elevate that process by right clicking the program icon and selecting “Run as Administrator”

Vista Run As Administrator

If you use a program many times through the day, it is nice to change the properties of that app and force it to run as administrator. That way you are automatically prompted when you launch it – no right clicking needed

Run As Administrator Option

This is where I got really frustrated with Vista. Do the same for the command prompt shortcut and everything is disabled on that page

Elevated Command Prompt Disabled

For the longest time I could not figure out how to get the command prompt to auto-elevate. I even resorted to using this tool (Great tool BTW) to change the resources within the cmd.exe file to force it to run as administrator.

Today I re-installed my Vista machine for the 20th time, and I finally found out how you can do this – It was much simpler than I thought.

You right click on the command prompt icon, and go to properties.

Click on advanced

Command Prompt Advanced Properties

Then. SURPRISE! There is the option:

Run As Administrator

Woo Hoo! Now I don’t have to keep right clicking on the command prompt to elevate it.

Filed Under: Windows

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