I have an Active Directory Domain that has lots of user accounts, under many organizational units. I wanted to find an easy way to see all of the user accounts within the domain.

My friend Matt told me about this free tool called DumpSec from SystemTools.com

When you first launch the app it defaults to the local system (You can use this tool for local computer security info too btw). I wanted it to export information about the domain, so I had to change it to look at the domain controller instead.

You can do this by clicking on the reports menu within the app, and the pick then option that says “Select Computer”

Then type in the host name of one of your domain controllers.

Once it is connected, you can click that reports tab again and pick what you want to export. It can export:

-File system permissions
-Registry permissions
-Printer permissions
-Share permissions
-A shared directories permissions
-All shared directories permissions
-Groups
-Users
-Policies
-Rights
-Servers

For me, I just needed a current list of users. I picked the fast option:

Within a few seconds I had a complete list of users on my domain, and the program allowed me to easily save it to a text file.

A great free tool – if you need to audit permissions on your domain I highly recommend it.

Download a copy of it from here:

SystemTools.Com DumpSec Download

It is not as simple as it sounds. You have Exchange, and want forward to an outside email address.

With some other email servers, there is a one line entry where you can add an external account. Not so with Exchange.

Lets me walk you through it.

First, you need to create a contact. You do this by getting on your domain controller. Open up Active Directory Users and Computers

Go to the place where you want to create the contact, right click and select new contact

Click Next, and see that empty email address with the button next to it?

Click on it, and pick the SMTP address option

Click OK, and you can enter the external address you want to forward the mail to.

Click OK. Now you have your contact. What Next?

It depends on what you want to do. If you want to simply forward email for an existing user…simply go to the properties of that user and get to the “Exchange General” tab.

If you want to forward email via an internal account, then create a dummy user account and create a mailbox for it. Then go to the “Exchange General” section of the properties of that user.

Click on the delivery options button.

See the middle part, click the modify button and select the contact you created earlier. If you want email to go to the external account, and the local exchange user, make sure you check the option that says “Deliver Messages to both…”

Now. Click OK on all the boxes. Does it work yet? No. You need to wait a few minutes before Exchange will process all the changes. Keep that in mind when testing – or you might pull all your hair out.

Last weekend I fixed up an old machine of mine. I was about to give it to the local Salvation Army.

They will take your old computers, clean em up, and then sell them at one of their outlet stores. They then take the money and put it to good use.

Before I brought it over, I remembered I had used it to do my taxes year after year. Even though I did a format and reload, I wanted to make sure all of that info was gone.

I found the perfect tool to do this. Best of all, it is free. It is called Darik’s Boot And Nuke. It is very simple. You download the ISO, burn it, and boot with it.

When it boots, you are given a few options:

Press enter to get to the menu (It won’t start erasing yet). Go into the Wipe options, and you can tell it what type of erase you would like to perform. There are quicker ones, like the Department of Defense (Short):

It only makes 3 erase passes. This is good enough for most situations. But if you really want to make sure it is all gone you can go with the Gutmann Wipe – 35 passes!

Just remember, the more passes, the longer you will need to wait.

Go back to the main options screen, and hit F10 (Wait! This will totally erase your hard drive – all your data will be toast. Yea, you knew that)

It will start nuking your drive:

Once it is finished, you can load your favorite OS, and sell it on eBay, or give it away – no worries that someone will get your private info.

I have been avoiding it for a long time. I know batch files, and VB script so well that I am not in the mood to learn a totally different scripting language.

As each day passes Microsoft is slowly phasing out their support for VB Script. Eventually Power Shell will be the only way to get admin scripts to run on your Windows Box.

While I was browsing TechNet, I found some great likes that can help you get up to speed:

Getting started with PowerShell 2.0 – A perfect place to start creating your first script.

Piping and The Pipeline – Shows you how to string PowerShell scripts together

Tab Expansion – You have seen it before. Press Tab at the command line and it automatically finishes your thought. Same for PowerShell

Shortcut Keys – Learn how to use keyboard shortcuts that will save you time

Remoting – Run your scripts across the network.

The last one is my fav. Simply because PowerShell makes remote admin so much easier (Once you get it configured).

To get a PowerShell session with a remote computer, type:

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName {HOSTNAME}

Where {HOSTNAME} is the name of the remote computer.

If remote administration is not enabled on the remote machine, you will see an error like this:

Powershell has a built-in command to enable remote admin:

winrm quickconfig

Execute the above command on the remote system, and it will add the proper firewall exceptions for your remote session to get through.

Now, to kill that process – get the remote session open and this command will do the trick:

Stop-Process -processname notepad

It kills any open copy of notepad on the remote system.

Clearly, PowerShell is a whole new experience. Not happy I have to re-learn everything, but it does seem like a few commands can go a long way.

I got a question from Jonathan:

Hi!
I have a feature request (For Network Administrator). Is it possible to add classic search when windows desktop search is installed by default?

I prefer classic search, as do my users, though the desktop search is more useful for email, the majority of my users search for files and I think the WDS to be rather awful at that for some reason.

It turns out that these changes are a simple registry tweak.

Lets go back to how it gets on your system in the first place. Microsoft Office 2007 needs WDS to search email. You faithfully download, and install the WDS update. Later, as a nice surprise, you go to search for a file, and get to see this:

And like Jonathan said, the WDS update is awful. But switching it off for files, is a simple registry change.

To make this switch easy, we have added a new plugin to Network Administrator (A free download for updating 3 computers at a time):

The properties page lets you tweak your windows search settings:

Download a free copy from here:

Network Administrator Download

When you switch it back, you get to use the good ole classic search:

As a bonus, you can go way back to the original search, and remove the helper doggy:

If you want to DYI it, these are the registry keys that need changing:

CTRL – F Hot Key:

Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DB
Value: "UseWinKey"= 0 (Disable CTRL- F), 1 (Enable CTRL - F)
Type: DWORD


Classic Search:

Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Desktop Search\DS
Value: "ShowStartSearchBand"= 0 (Enable Windows Search), 1 (Enable Classic Search)
Type: DWORD


Helper Doggy:

Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState
Value: "Use Search Asst" = no (Disable Doggy), yes (Enable Doggy)
Type: String


That’s it. Just a few registry tweaks, and the good windows search is back.

When I first came across Windows 2008 Core, I was happy. Finally, a version of windows you could chisel down to just the base components that you needed.

Microsoft did such a good job – that it is hard to configure it with the default settings

No graphical tools are provided (Well there are a few…but not many). When you logon, you are welcomed with a command line window that sits in the middle of the screen:

The frustration level increases exponentially when you want to get something done.

For security reasons, remote administration is disabled by default. Remote Administration – not to be confused with Remote Desktop is the file and printer sharing component that allows you to remotely use computer management, event viewer, service manager, or third party tools like our Network Administrator

To remove the firewall restrictions that block its use, simply type this at the command line:

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Administration" new enable=yes

After that command, some remote services will work. For example, you can remotely reboot or shutdown the machine using Network Administrator

But…if you want to manage services, add/remove/edit users using computer management, or look at the event log remotely…you will still get access denied messages.

You need to tell Core 2008 what users are allowed to connect. You can do this by typing this at the command line:

cmdkey /add:ServerName /user:UserName /pass:password

Where ServerName is the name of the local server, and the username and password are for an administrator account.

That is all there is to it. After those two commands you can remotely manage your 2008 core server with ease.

I had a test machine I was setting up this week. SQL Server 2008 was one of the applications I needed to install.

The only problem, is that I could never get past the pre-requisites:

Digging deeper, the true cause of the message was “There are pending file changes. Please reboot”. After 3 reboots and counting, I was still getting this error message.

After searching the net, I discovered there is a registry key that Windows uses to move, or delete files on boot. This helps when you have files that are always in use and can only be deleted or renamed when windows has not started up yet.

After all those reboots, I checked the key:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

Under that key, there is a value named “PendingFileRenameOperations”

Windows is supposed to scan through it, do its thing, and then clear it out.

For some reason, these temp files were stuck in the list:

I cleared it out (You can do this by selecting the text, and hitting the delete key), and started my SQL setup again….and tada! – It worked:

Many setup programs that look at this key – so it works for more than just SQL Server. Keep in mind, the pending list is there for a reason. Don’t tinker with it unless you have already tried rebooting.

Last week I wrote how to FTP the contents of a folder by just using a batch file. We had a few good suggestions on how to improve that script.

Listening to those suggestions, I have come up with this updated version:

@echo off
rem ===============================
rem = FTP Script Made by =
rem = http://www.intelliadmin.com =
rem ===============================

REM = Delete our temp script file and we are done
del %SCRIPT_NAME% /q
@echo on


An additional note: If your password, or username contain special characters (%, &, etc) you can escape them by putting a ^ before them. If you forget this, your username or password will not be properly echoed and you will get a login failure

If your password is: &1994ABCD

You would write: ^&1994ABCD

(Thanks Mike for emailing me this tip!)

Now, on to the email notifications. My favorite tool of choice for this is blat. It is free, easy to use, and will even cook you dinner. You can find it here:

http://www.blat.net/

To see how to use it, visit an older article of mine:

Send Email from the command line

One disappointment I had was that the FTP.exe program does not set %ERRORLEVEL% on failure. I was hoping that I could get it to send email only if it failed. The compromise is an email each time it runs. To see if it failed, you look at the email message and see the FTP output.

First, we will modify our script to redirect the ftp output to a text file. This can be done by changing the FTP.exe call in the batch file to this:

ftp -s:%SCRIPT_NAME% >> status.log

Then, at the end of the script we can call blat.exe, and send out our text file. Here is an example of how I would send it to support@intelliadmin.com:

blat.exe -f support@intelliadmin.com -to support@intelliadmin.com -server my.smtp.server -subject "FTP Script Results" -bodyF status.log

Each time the script runs, I will get the FTP output sent to me.

Here is the finished script:


@echo off
rem ===============================
rem = FTP Script Made by =
rem = http://www.intelliadmin.com =
rem ===============================

REM = Delete our temp script file and we are done
del %SCRIPT_NAME% /q
blat.exe -f [from_email] -to [to_email] -server [your smtp server] -subject "FTP Script Results" -bodyF status.log
del status.log
@echo on


One last note – if anyone knows of a way to detect that FTP.exe encountered an error, please let me know. It would be great if you could get it to email only if it failed, or create different subject lines to get your attention when it fails.

Hello All,

A quick post to let you know that we have released Remote Control 4.4.

This is a bug-fix release. We made sure we cleared through all of the issues raised by current customers before moving forward with anything new.

Here is what we fixed:

-Shutdown under Vista/Windows7/2008 does not disconnect the remote client (Fixed)

-Windows 2000 machines with NVidia cards show strange graphics when connecting (Fixed)

-ALT key gets stuck when pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL while a client window is open (Fixed)

-Client crashes on reconnect attempts under Windows XP SP2 (Fixed)

-Intermittent Connection issues with Windows 2000 (Fixed)

-CTRL-SHIFT-ESC not sent from client to agent (Fixed)

-Crash when clicking the find button under Windows XP SP2, while a reconnect in progress (Fixed)

-ALT, CTRL, or Windows keys get stuck at intermittent times. (Fixed)

The key sticking issue was a big one, and we apologize to any of you who have experienced it. The issue has been resolved – you just need to update the client to fix it.

You can download the latest version from here:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/setupex.exe

Make sure the client is closed when you install. When you are finished, you can check the build number by clicking on settings and then moving over to the about tab:

Note that if you have the trial version it will be 4.4.27.10

Current customers may get the latest version by simply visiting the same download link that was sent in the license email. If you do have trouble finding it, simply send us an email and we will take care of you asap.

I have a group of log files that I need to upload every day to an archival server. For a long time I have been doing this by hand.

I wanted a way to do this without using any extra software – just the default tools available in windows.

I found a clean solution that uses a batch file, and the scripting capabilities of FTP.

First, lets start with the criteria.

I have a group of files, all named XXX.log that I want to FTP to my server

So what is our first step?

Lets start with a batch file that will list all of the files ending with .log in the current directory. We can do this with the for .. in command:

for %%f in (*.log) do @echo %%f

Simple enough. Execute it in the folder with our files, and we see our output:

Now, we can use that information to build our FTP script. Let me show you a simple FTP script that can upload one file:

open hostname
administrator
Password2000
bin
put SomeFile.log
quit


If you save the above as a text file (Lets call it script_file.txt), and then feed it to the FTP program like this:

ftp -s:script_file.txt

The FTP program will run through the commands and upload the file.

So now we have both parts that we need. Lets write a batch file that will build a temp script file, process it with FTP, and then remove the temp file:


@rem ===============================
@rem = FTP Script Made by =
@rem = http://www.intelliadmin.com =
@rem ===============================

@REM = Delete our temp script file and we are done
@del %SCRIPT_NAME% /q


It will generate our script file, fill it with the files that match our criteria (*.log), and then execute FTP with it. When it is finished, the temp file is removed.

Note that if you want to use it, change the [username], [password], and [host] to your own values. You can even change the file criteria (*.log) to any type you need to upload – or even all of them if you use *.*

Now, you can easily add it to task scheduler, or even add it as a batch command when your backups are complete.

Next week I will show you how to email yourself the results each time it is run.