I received an email from Jennifer this week:

“Howdy Steve. I want to thank you for all the tips and ideas. I ran across this small utility that I think your readers might like. It is called Share Watch. It lets you keep track of what files and folders are being accessed by remote users”

She is right. This little utility is great.

Yes, Windows has a built in share monitoring service:

But, it is kind of clunky and limited. It really has not changed much since Windows 2000.

What is nice about Share Monitor is that it puts all of the information in one spot:

Plus, unlike the windows share monitor…you can watch a bunch of computers at the same time:

It has easy access to information about the computers connecting to a share:

And the files that are currently open across a share:

Plus, like a lot of our utilities – No install is required. It is one small exe.

Best of all, it is free for personal or commercial use.

Get it from the Share Watch website:

http://stevemiller.net/ShareWatch/

PS: If you run it under Vista, or Windows 7…make sure you right click and run it as administrator or you will get access denied.

This week we have a question from Melissa:

“Hi Steve. Got a really quick question. Previously you had an article that showed how to burn an ISO from the command line. My question is, what about a folder? I want to simply burn a folders contents to a DVD once a week. Any simple way to do this?”

Good question Melissa. I too have been looking for something like this.

Most of the DVD/CD burning software is not free.

That is not a big problem…but I would think that the simple process of copying a folder to a DVD or CD shouldn’t cost me $49!

So what to do? Have the IntelliAdmin team make one for you!

This first version we wanted to be as simple as possible, so it only does one thing: Burn a folder to a disk.

-You specify a drive, and a folder.

-It burns it and closes the session on the drive

-If it fails, the program will return 1

-If it succeeds the program will return 0

This means you can create conditional statements in a batch file too.

How do you use it?

Once you grab it from our downloads page you can call it like this from the command line:

BurnDisk.exe E: C:\Backup

Where ‘E:’ is the DVD/CD drive letter, and C:\Backup is the folder you want to back up.

It will automatically set the volume name to the current date. It will then zip through your specified folder and burn the contents to the CD or DVD:

You can use the ERRORLEVEL value for conditional statements in your batch file (Like send you an email if it fails)

Here is an example bat file that checks the result of the BurnDisk.exe output:

@ECHO OFF

:COMPLETE


This is version 1.0 so it is quite simple – but for many situations I think it will work perfect.

Let us know what “Must Have” features you want to see in 1.1

It has been tested on Windows Vista, 2008, and 7. It should work on 2003 and XP (With the latest patches) but we have not had a chance to try it on those platforms yet.

Get it from our downloads page

I got a question from Lewis this week:

“I hope this email finds you well. I have a plotter here at my company, and the driver is really temperamental. At least twice a week the driver crashes, and then all of the jobs get stuck in the spooler. To fix it I need to stop the spooler service, delete all the jobs and start the service again. Is there any easy way to do this remotely with a script? Have a Merry Christmas Steve, and thanks for all the tips”

Good question. A script in this case won’t always work. This is because with Vista, Windows 7, and 2008 the print spooler folder is restricted. Only the system account can access it.

A way around this is to use our Network Administrator tool. It will remotely execute the script in the system account context.

This is how the script would look if we wanted to stop the print spooler, delete the files, and start it again:

net stop spooler
del %systemroot%\System32\spool\printers\*.shd /q
del %systemroot%\System32\spool\printers\*.spl /q
net start spooler


.shd, and .spl files are print job files. If you delete them, it will wipe away any pending jobs.

You could put this into a bat file, and simply use the remote execute option of Network Administrator. To make it a smoother experience, we created a plugin that will handle everything for you:

You can also tell it if you want to delete all the pending jobs:

This can be quite helpful if you have a huge backlog of print jobs:

Using Network Administrator to do this is quicker than manually deleting the jobs since it does not have to talk back and forth with the printer driver to do it.

Get your free copy from our download page:

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

The free version is free for commercial and personal use. No spyware or adware – only software goodness.

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:)

I got a question from Tracy this week:

“Hi Steve. Love all the tools and tips you keep sending our way. Got a question. Is there any easy way to logoff a user when they are not active for say, 15 Minutes?”

I spoke with Tracy further to explain that forcing a logoff could cause data loss.

For example, a user has a Word document open and they walk away. Then boom the forced logoff happens and their document is gone.

In her case she needs it for public facing kiosks. If one of the technicians walks away, it leaves the system wide open.

Locking the workstation for this situation is bad too – since it makes it so the customer cannot use the machine.

Did some googling and found some hacks that used chopped up screen savers that would activate, and then call some logoff code.

Didn’t like that. So I had the team build a little app that would just logoff or lock idle users.

Here is how it works, you call the program like this:

idlelogoff.exe [timeout] [action]

action - [logoff / lock] You can lock the workstation or log the user off

If you wanted a user to get booted off after 5 minutes (300 Seconds) of no activity, You would call it like this:

idlelogoff.exe 300 LOGOFF

Or, if you wanted it to lock the workstation after 30 seconds of no activity this would do the trick

idlelogoff.exe 30 LOCK

It has some sanity checking for the timeout. Anything less than 10 seconds is set to 10 seconds.

Call it from the users startup script to make sure it is active while they are logged in.

Get it from our downloads page:

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

It is free for personal and commercial use.

If you spend any amount of time working with Unix, you will come across Cron and the CronTab file.

What is it?

Cron allows you to schedule programs to run at specified intervals, like every Sunday at 1AM.

Now I can already hear it…”Steve, that is what the task scheduler is for in Windows”

While it is true you can schedule tasks in Windows, one big issue with task scheduler is how do you transfer scheduled tasks from one computer to another?

You could copy the folder c:\windows\tasks, but this is totally unsupported and it does not always work.

That is the beauty of Cron. Every bit of scheduling info is contained within the Crontab file.

If you want a group of servers to have the same scheduled jobs, you just need to sync this file. No registry hacks, no tricks. Just one file.

Not only that, since it is just a simple text file you can easily schedule jobs from PHP, PowerShell or VBScript…without any ActiveX or hooks into Windows. You just need to modify a simple text file.

There are a few Windows implementations out there…but most of them are quite old. We wanted something that would work on 2000 through 2008 x64 – so we built our own

To use it, download the setup file from our downloads page:

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

The install does not create any icons, or shortcuts. It installs all the application files into c:\program files\IntelliAdmin\Cron by default, and automatically starts the cron service (Named icronsvr).

There are two files for configuration, they are both in the same folder as the service.

The first to look at is the file config.cfg:

[Configuration]
status_enabled=true
status_handler=
path=


Here is what each option does:

status_enabled (true/false) – If set to true, each time a program is executed it is logged to a file named status.log in the same folder as the service

status_handler – If set to point to an executable file, it is executed each time a process is run. The first argument is the status text shown in status.log. (Example usage of this would be to send an email each time a process is executed by cron..using a bat file and a command like tool blat)

path – An alternative path for the crontab file. By default the service looks for the crontab in the same folder as the service. Setting this tells the service to look at the specified folder for the crontab file

The next is the actual crontab file. It roughly follows the same format as the Unix crontab

The file is formatted in this way:

[M] [H] [D] [M] [DOW] [Process Name] [Process Arguments]

M – The minute that the process should be executed (0-59)
H – The hour that the process should be executed (0-23)
D – The day that the process should be executed (1-31)
M – The month that the process should be executed (1-12)
DOW – The day of the week that the process should be executed (0-6 Sunday = 0, Monday = 1, Etc)

Note: Our format does not support names such as THU, or JAN…only numerical values

Each section can:

-Have a range of values like this: 12-24 (All items from 12 to 24)
-Have a list of values like this: 12,13,14,15
-Include all possible values like this: *
-Skip values using the / like this: 0-59/5 (This would only include 0,5,10,15,20,etc)

Lets put it all together. If we wanted a process to run every 5 minutes we would create a line like this in our crontab file:

*/5 * * * * c:\process.bat

See how the skip value works? We specified the * for the minute section (All minutes), and then told it to skip 5. This means it will run at 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.

If you wanted to run a process every Sunday at 1 pm:

00 01 * * 00 c:\process.bat

Or how about, only every Sunday from June to the end of the year:

00 01 * 06-12 00 c:\process.bat

At 15, and 30 minutes past every hour:

15,30 * * * * c:\process.bat

This might give you a clearer picture:

*     *     *   *    *     C:\SomeEXE.EXE ARG1 ARG2 ARG3
-     -     -   -    -
|     |     |   |    |
|     |     |   |    +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
|     |     |   +------- month (1 - 12)
|     |     +--------- day of        month (1 - 31)
|     +----------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------- min (0 - 59)

It takes a little time to get used to the format, but once you do it is a breeze to work with.

A few things to think about when using this:

-Make sure you secure the crontab file by only allowing ‘System’ and Administrator write access. Otherwise a standard user could simply alter the crontab file and start running stuff as ‘System’

-The programs are run in the context of a service. By default the user account is ‘System’, and for security reasons it does not have network share access. If you want to allow access to network shares you would have to go into the settings of the IntelliAdmin Cron Service, and have it login as a user with the appropriate rights.

-Since it is a service, make sure your program does not pop up forms or message boxes…otherwise they will just get stuck and you will never see them. Test…test…test before you deploy.

If you have any other features you would like to add to this little tool, let us know and we will see what we can do.

If you have been using Windows 7 (Or even Vista) for a while, you might have noticed something really annoying.

When you have drives mapped in explorer:

They don’t show up in a command prompt if it is elevated with administrator permissions:

There is a simple reason for this – The feature known as User Account Control, or UAC. When you want to launch a program with admin rights, you see that familiar window:

This causes the application to execute under a different user token, and in turn it means that you have a totally different set of mapped drives (Usually none!)

Personally I will take the security risk of the standard apps and the elevated apps sharing the same set of mapped drives – before you do this you need to determine if this risk is too high for your situation.

To get windows to share the list of mapped drives between both, you need to make a registry change.

Drill down to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Under that key create a DWORD value named:

EnableLinkedConnections

And set it to 1

If you don’t want to plunk around in the registry, we have updated Network Administrator to do it for you.

Download your copy from here:

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

Just make sure you reboot after the change – it won’t take effect until you do.

I have been testing parts of our software lately (Alpha stuff that will be released in a few months). One problem I keep running into, is I collect up a large number of mapped drives that are unavailable:

This is because the machine is powered off, or is a virtual machine that I deleted.

I like to use the same set of drive letters for testing, since it makes it simpler, and I don’t have to keep changing paths. The problem is that once a drive becomes ‘unavailable’ you need to to explicitly disconnect each one by using the command:

net use /delete [drive]

I was getting tired of doing this all the time, so I built a script that will automatically clear out disconnected or unavailable drives.

Here is the script:

@echo off
for /F "tokens=1-3" %%a in ('net use') do (
if /i %%a==Disconnected net use /delete %%b
if /i %%a==Unavailable net use /delete %%b
)

It loops through all the network connections, and looks for ‘Disconnected’ or ‘Unavailable’ and runs a ‘net use /delete [drive]‘ against it.

I ran it once on my machine:

It cleared out all of those unavailable drives in a few seconds.

This can be helpful in your login scripts too – if the user has failed mappings from before, it can prevent your logon script from properly mapping to the correct server.

If you want to create a shortcut to it on your desktop, just create a new text file, name it “clear_drives.bat” and put the above script in.

Now if you want to clear out your unavailable drives you just need to double click on a shortcut, instead of wasting time in the command line.

Got a question from Brett this week:

“Hi Steve. I have a tough one for you. I want to determine from a VBScript if a program is using too much CPU time. Specifically, I want to know when the spooler service goes over 50% CPU utilization. All the scripts I see don’t seem to work like task manager (The CPU time reported by the script is much higher). Thanks, and keep it up.”

Thanks Brett. I did some testing, and indeed you are correct that all of the scripts I found report CPU usage differently than task manager.

The reason for this is that the scripts are reporting the percentage of usage on one specific core.

What you need to do is find out how many cores there are and then divide the cpu usage by that number.

After lots of experimenting with different versions of Windows, I came up with a script that will do this on Windows XP through 2008 R2.

Click here to download the script
(Rename to .VBS after downloading)

If you open the script, and scroll to the bottom…you can see how to use it.

In your case, we want to check the spooler process. On Windows 7 it is named “spoolsv”. I want to check once a minute, and if it goes over 50%, the script will show a message box.

Here is how I would do that:

while (true)
 'Check our spooler for over 50% cpu time
 if (check_process_cpu_time("spoolsv",50)) then
  MsgBox "Spooler is running high on CPU Time!"
 end if
 'Wait a minute before checking again
 WScript.Sleep(60000)
wend


I wouldn’t set the checking time for less than a minute, since the script itself takes some work to get this info.

Also, notice that the name you use for the process does not include the file extension. In our example we want to watch spoolsv.exe, so we provide spoolsv to the script.

This is just a demo, but you cold have it send an email using blat or, have it send you an windows message using the msg command in windows – the possibilities are endless.

Now Brett will know when his printer spooler is jacked up, before he starts getting phone calls.

A few weeks back I wrote about a way to delete or move a file on reboot.

Why would you want to do that?

It is probably in use by an application or service that you can’t seem to find (Usually maleware or a virus).

Many readers were kind enough to point me to a free tool offered by MalwareBytes – it is called FileAssassin.

It allows you to unlock any file in use, without the reboot.

It is very simple to use.

Launch the application, and pick the file you want to remove:

Select your options (Notice it can delete on reboot too)

After you pick your file and options – execute. Now your file is unlocked, without a reboot.

Download it from here:
http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/fileassassin

It is free for commercial and personal use – another great tool to add to that flash drive you carry around