I got a question from John this week:

“A few of my clients are using a broadband connection with DHCP addresses for the public interface. Do you know of a script or program that can be used to monitor the IP address and send a email if the IP address changes?”

Good question. It is possible to get IP address lists from VB Script, but we happen to have a utility we have used internally for quite some time. It is called “MyIP.exe”

MyIP.exe has two options. You can get a current list of IP addresses like this:

MyIP.exe /list

It will return a list of your current IP addresses to the command line:

C:\temp>myip /list
10.10.29.231
192.168.68.1
192.168.198.1

The second option is /wait. It will pause until it sees an IP change. When the change happens it will pause for 15 seconds to allow any DHCP addressing to settle down, and then finally return the result to the command line.

How do we set this up to email when we detect an IP change?

We can use blat. Blat is a tool for sending email from the command line.

Here is how I would structure a bat file to use both programs:

:Loop
@ECHO OFF
ECHO IP Address Change > status.log
ECHO ========================= >> status.log
ECHO The computer %COMPUTERNAME% has had an IP address change >> status.log
ECHO This is the new IP list: >> status.log
MyIP.exe /wait >> status.log
blat.exe -f support@intelliadmin.com -to support@intelliadmin.com -server mysmtp.server.com -subject "IP Change" -bodyF status.log
ECHO "Waiting for IP Change..."
goto loop

What is going on in the code above?

First we build up a file called status.log. It is filled with the body of our email. It contains everything except our list of changed IP addresses. Then MyIP.exe will wait until a change happens - when it does, those IPs are written to the end of status.log

Finally, blat sends out the text file with the subject "IP Change". When that is done, it loops back around to wait for a change all over again.

One important thing to note about SMTP - Many internet providers are blocking send from port 25 by default, except to their own email servers. So make sure you test the script out before depending on it.

MyIP.exe can be found in our downloads section:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/downloads/

Blat can be found here:

http://www.blat.net/

One final note. Most likely you want this IP address information because you need to remote into their computer from time to time. Our Enterprise Remote control has this functionality built in. It will automatically track all IP address changes on remote machines, and you only need a username to find their computer! - Might save you a lot of time and trouble:)

If you have ever copied a large number of files on Windows, you know how frustrating it can be.

Sometimes a simple error can cancel a huge job.

Sometimes you might start a copy before leaving the office…only to find out that 10 minutes into it, Windows asks you if you want to replace a file.

Don’t even get me started with the estimated time to complete dialogs – totally worthless.

Found a solution – It is a free tool called TeraCopy.

The part I like about it is that it is lightweight, and it is only for copying files.

Nothing else.

You can easily access it from any folder or file. Right click, and send to TeraCopy…could not be easier:

What if you want to copy your files and then shutdown your system? You can easily tell TeraCopy to do that:

What about those replace or skip dialogs? You tell it what to do – without waiting 5 minutes for it to ask you:

Even better, you can pause, and resume file copies. Can’t tell you how many times I wanted to do this to take the load off the network for a minute or two:

This is an awesome little utility. Works on 2000 through Windows 7 x64.

You can download it from here:

TeraCopy Download Page

Windows Server Core is a stripped down version of 2008. It has no explorer, and most GUI functionality is removed.

A great solution when you don’t want any extra software running on a production server.

Soo much is missing that it can get frustrating when you just want to make a few changes before you put the server into production.

When you boot, it simply launches a command line:

With the latest version, it has improved…they do include a console interface to make configuration changes:

Still, that is too limited, and leaves you frustrated

You end up having to go through a lot of hoops to even make simple changes.

There is an answer to this – The Windows 2008 Server Core Configurator.

It comes in the form of an ISO, so you can burn it to a CD or add it to your VMWare storage.

Once you mount the ISO, or pop in the CD, you can launch it from the command line like this:

start_coreconfig

The first time you run it, it will check to make sure it has all of the software needed to run…namely powershell.

Once it is done, it launches – then you can easily make your configuration changes:

You can change network settings

Firewall

Remote Desktop

Services

And much more. The best part is, you make your changes pop out the CD and it leaves nothing behind.

You can download it for free from here:

http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/

I got a question from one of our customers this week,

“Is there a way to run profile generator based on its workstation name? We want cached mode activated for laptops but not desktops. Or can you advise how this can be determined with the batch file?”

Actually we have had a tool internally that we have used for a long time. I decided to clean it up, and add it to our free tools.

It is called “IsComputer.exe” and you can get it from our downloads page

Here is how it works. You can give it two conditions – The version of Windows, or the name of the computer.

Lets say I want part of my script to only run on computers that are not Vista and above (Windows 2003, XP, and 2000) and start with the name LAPTOP:

IsComputer /name:LAPTOP* /os:CLASSIC

Or, I want it to only run on Windows 2003 computers:

IsComputer /OS:Windows2003

Or, maybe just computers that have ‘server’ in their name:

IsComputer /Name:*server*

Those are just a few options – a complete list of options can be viewed by running it from the command line.

How do we get it to work with our batch file?

If a condition matches, the program will return 1. If it does not match it will return 0. Here is how we can create a simple script that will output ‘hello’ if we have a match:

@echo off
IsComputer /OS:Classic /quiet /name:rack*
if ERRORLEVEL 1 goto RUN_SCRIPT
if ERRORLEVEL 0 goto EXIT_SCRIPT

:EXIT_SCRIPT


This example script will output ‘hello’ if the computer is running Windows 2003, and the name of the computer starts with ‘rack’.

You could put the batch file commands you want to execute right where the “echo hello” statement is.

Got a question, or an idea for a free tool? Let me know by mailing support@intelliadmin.com

I got a question from Thomas this week:

Our office has a licensed copy of Network Administrator 3.0 which allows
me to disable CD/DVD access. Is there an action that will allow me just
disable the CD/DVD burn capability but still allow users to view files
on CD/DVD?

Burn..keep it from burning?

Oops not that kind of burn – Yes excellent question. After a quick search I discovered this is an easy registry change.

If you drill down to this key:

Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Create a DWORD value of NoCDBurning, and set it to 1. Reboot, and the built in burn functionality of Windows is gone.

This works on XP through Windows 7. Now one Gotcha with this is that it does *not* prevent third party apps from burning. You would need to handle this with a separate policy.

If you don’t want to plunk around the registry, we updated Network Administrator to make the change for you:

It is a free download from here and it can push this change to computers remotely.

I have gotten this call before – A friend has a new computer. For a free dinner or maybe a few beers (Or Both!) would I help them move everything over?

Sure no problem I say. Just a few word docs, and an email account.

Hmm..an email account.

This friend of mine has used Gmail with Outlook – for a long time. As long as Gmail has been around. Unfortunately he only typed in his password once. Now, he can’t remember it.

So here we are. We have the password on his old machine. I can see those little *** taunting me in Outlook.

Sure, I could email the nice folks at Google and try to recover the password, but I know from experience this will take a long time.

Then I remembered there is an awesome utility from NirSoft called MailPassView. This little gem can pull the passwords out of almost every known email client.

You can download it from here:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mailpv.html

Within a few seconds of launching the app, it found my friend’s account:

A Double click on the entry and I had the password:

Much easier than trying password recovery with Google.

Here is a complete list of the email clients that it supports:

Outlook Express
Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only)
Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003/2007/2010 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts)
Windows Mail
Windows Live Mail
IncrediMail
Eudora
Netscape 6.x/7.x (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
Mozilla Thunderbird (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
Group Mail Free
Yahoo! Mail – If the password is saved in Yahoo! Messenger application.
Hotmail/MSN mail – If the password is saved in MSN/Windows/Live Messenger application.
Gmail – If the password is saved by Gmail Notifier application, Google Desktop, or by Google Talk.

Best of all, this thing is free. You can’t beat that!

Keep this one handy. You will need it someday.

On one of our servers we have a batch processing program. It is old and clunky, but it gets the job done.

An irritating bug it has is that it leaves temp files around in the c:\windows\temp folder.

One day we noticed the server was getting slow – finally realized that the temp folder had over 100,000 files!

We don’t have the code for this program, so we can’t fix the bug. An easy fix would be to setup a scheduled task to trash that folder every night.

Oscar would like to have all those files every night, but the problem with this solution is it can cause problems with apps that actually are *using* those temp files.

What we needed was a way to delete files that were over 1 day old. This was enough to make sure the temp file was no longer used by any of our processing apps.

After searching around, I found a command line program that Microsoft included with some versions of windows. It is called “forfiles”

ForFiles will process a command against files and folders that match your criteria. It allows you to set wildcards, pick only folders, or only files…and more importantly it allows you to specify something like “I only want files that are more than 1 day old”

First, let me show you the possible command line arguments for it:


/P Path Name - Indicates the path to start searching. The default folder is the current working directory

/D date Selects files with a last modified date greater than or equal to (+), or less than or equal to (-), the specified date using the "yyyy/MM/dd" format; or selects files with a last modified date greater than or equal to (+) the current date plus "dd" days, or less than or equal to (-) the current date minus "dd" days. valid "dd" number of days can be any number in the range of 0 - 32768."+" is taken as default sign if not specified.


Cool. It has everything we need.

Lets start out with the path. We want it to look in c:\windows\temp

forfiles -p "c:\windows\temp"

I want to include subfolders:

forfiles -p "c:\windows\temp" -s

Using the date option, I tell it anything over 1 day old:

forfiles -p "c:\windows\temp" -s -d -1

I only want to delete the files that end with .tmp:

forfiles -p "c:\windows\temp" -s -d -1 -m *.tmp

And finally, the command I want to execute against the files it finds is del:

forfiles -p "c:\windows\temp" -s -d -1 -m *.tmp
-c "cmd /c del /f /q @path"

Note the use of the @path variable – it is one of the many variables forfiles recognizes.

So there it is – a one line command that will delete files from our temp folder over 1 day old:

forfiles -p "c:\windows\temp" -s -d -1 -m *.tmp -c "cmd /c del /f /q @path"

If your copy of windows does not have forfiles, you can download it from the Microsoft FTP Server here:

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ResKit/y2kfix/x86/

I am really impressed with this little utility, and the possibilities are endless. I highly suggest keeping a copy on your flash drive.

I got a question from a customer last week:

Hi Steve,
I just bought your program on Friday and I love it. I have one question though: Is there any way to use IntelliAdmin Network Administrator to set not only the VNC password but also the VNC view only password?

Thanks..

After poking around and playing with TightVNC we found two things that Network Administrator did not support – view only passwords, and the new registry format used in TightVNC 2.0

We have updated Network Administrator to support both of these. (Note that it is a free tool, and you only need to purchase if you want to use it on more than three computers at a time)

You can download the latest from here:

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

How do you use it?

Open the app, pick the action you want to take (In our case that would be set vnc password)

Set your password(s)

Pick the computers you want to target:

Click start, and it will make the change.

Got an idea to improve one of our plugins, or an idea for a new plugin for Network Administrator? Let us know by sending an email to support@intelliadmin.com

Over the holidays I had the joy of cleaning up a few computers. It is surprising how fast a system can get loaded with software that increases boot time.

Normally I cleanup by hand using msconfig, and regedit. I was tired of disabling critical software by accident (Like printer helper apps), so I searched around, and I found a tool that allows you to visualize how each program impacts your boot time.

It is called Soluto, and you can download from here:

http://www.soluto.com

The install is simple. Download and run the setup file:

Reboot your system, and it will analyze all of the processes that launch at boot time. The cool part is that it looks up each application in a database that is updated by users like yourself – it has a built in wiki editing tool to update information about apps it does not recognize:

When it is finished, you can see all of the programs that impact your boot time. It shows you an exact boot time, and how much time each application takes to launch.

The application is crisp, and almost fun to use. The amount of detail on each application is amazing. The color coding will keep you from making mistakes – something easy to do when you are plunking away while drinking your third egg nog.

When you want to keep an app from running, simply pause it. It will never run again unless you manually launch it.

With a few quick clicks you can pause the applications you don’t need and dramatically reduce your boot time.

Nice tool, best of all it is free – definitely worth the download.

I came across a cool site, it is called Ninite:

http://ninite.com/

It has been a huge time saver for me. I had a dozen or so machines I had to setup for a friend over the weekend. Using this utility I cut down my time by creating one setup file with most of the applications that we wanted to install.

Here is how it works:

Go to the website, and check off all the applications you want:

Once you have made your selection, click the “Get Installer” button, and instantly you have a downloadable setup file that includes everything you selected:

The download is quite small – so getting it on each PC is quick. Launch it:

Right after launching it downloads and installs all of the applications you picked – with no user intervention.

Very slick.

There is a pro version, it allows you to install silently and create packages that do not require internet access.

Take it for a spin at http://www.ninite.com