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.

Sometimes the simplest tips are the best.

Normally I would not even write about this but it is such a great time saver, it is worth repeating even if only a few of you don’t know about it.

I know you have seen this before:

What is the problem here? Well, what if you want the “No to all” option?

Got to keep pressing N right?

Wrong!

Next time you see this dialog. Hold down the shift key, and then click no. That tells windows “No to all”!

All of your files will copy over, except the ones that already exist.

The sad part is I found this by accidentally holding down the shift key last week while pressing no

This week I received a question from Scott:

“Hi Steve,

Management at my company wants to block AIM (AOL Messenger) on all computers. Because some of the machines are not joined to the domain I want a way to do this from a script. The port is 4099 TCP btw. Thanks!”

I spoke with Scott, and I determined that all of his systems are running Vista or Windows 7 (Important since this tip won’t work on XP).

This can be done by adding an outbound rule to the built in firewall.

But like Scott said, he wants to do it from the command line.

This is easy using the ‘netsh’ command.

To block it we would call it like this:

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="BlockAIM" protocol=TCP
dir=out remoteport=4099 action=block

Let me explain each setting:

name = The name of the rule. (Pick something descriptive)
protocol = The protocol we are going to block (UDP or TCP for most cases)
dir = The direction of the block. Can be IN or OUT
remoteport = The port of the remote host that is going to be blocked
action = Could be block or allow. In our case we want to block the connection

Once you execute the above code, all outbound requests to any host on port 4099 will be blocked, and it adds an entry to the Windows firewall:

If you want to remove the rule from the command line, you can call netsh like this:

netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name="BlockAIM"

That is all there is to it. One line to add a rule, and one line to remove.

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.

In another life I worked at a bank.

We had a bunch of terminal servers – all of them packed with users.

Throughout the day I would get a call like this: “My teller program is stuck, can you help me?”

This buggy teller app would freeze up and no matter how much they tried to log on or log off, it would still be running in the terminal session.

Worse yet, because they logged on and off so many times they had frozen sessions running across all the terminal servers.

To fix it I would open the Microsoft Terminal Server management console, and then work my way through each server, then find the user, and then find the process that I needed to kill. A huge time sink.

That is the beauty of our new Remote Desktop Manager. It makes it a breeze to manage one, or 100 terminal servers.

You simply pick the machines you want to manage, enter your credentials, and then press start.

Then, it pulls information from all the servers and organizes it so you can quickly get your task done.

Need to find a process that might be running on multiple servers, under multiple sessions?

Switch the view to group by process, and you can kill it in a few clicks:

No scrolling around looking for it either, just start typing in the search bar above it and it instantly filters the view:

Got an upgrade you are going to install tonight, and need everyone to get out?

Don’t waste time calling around to all your branches and remote sites – just send a message to everyone:

Want to logoff a user on all terminal servers?

No problem, just sort by user, and log them off with two clicks:

This free tool is a technology preview of the next version of Network Administrator. This functionality, and much more will be included in the next version.

If you purchase now, you will receive a free upgrade when it is released:

Click here to purchase Network Administrator

The Remote Desktop Management tool is free for personal and commercial use, and as always – no spyware or adware, only freeware goodness.

Get it from our downloads page

The emails keep coming in. Keep it up

This question is from Steve (Awesome name, love it):

“Hi Steve. We have a piece of software that does not run as a service. It runs like any other application. You launch it and it performs batch processing. The problem is, well, if this application dies over the weekend it causes me a huge headache. It is buggy, crashes at the worst time, and it is needed to batch process items coming in from a web service. My question is, is there any way to automatically restart this app without me coming in to do it myself?”

Excellent question. First of all, you should never have to go into the office to fix a problem. Why aren’t you using a remote admin solution like ours for situations like this?

I know I know, you just want the damn thing to keep running no matter how bad it is

This can be accomplished with a small amount of VB Script. You will probably want to put this into your task scheduler to run at startup, so even if the PC gets rebooted it will automatically start again.

First, we need to see if an app is running. How can we do that?

Lets put some code together to see if notepad.exe is running:

set Service = GetObject ("winmgmts:")

for each Process in Service.InstancesOf ("Win32_Process")
 if Process.Name = sEXEName then
  bRunning=true
 End If
next


The above code will look at all the running processes, and try to find “notepad.exe” if it is active then the variable bRunning will be set to true. If not, then bRunning will be set to false.

We are almost half way there. Now, how do we launch an application from VB Script?

set Shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Shell.Run sApplicationPath & sEXEName


Now we have both parts that we need. 1 – Detect if an app is not running, and 2 – Launch of that is true.

Here is the final script:

wend


Don’t copy and paste…download it from here:

ApplicationRestart.dat

Make sure you rename it to .vbs

To change it to fit your needs, fill sApplicationPath and sEXEName with the name and path of the program you want to monitor. Launch it from a logon script, or the task scheduler and you should be good to go.

Trying something new this week – got a video version of this weeks tip:

Got a question from Linda this week,

“Steve. We have quite a few IIS based web servers and each of them has their own custom configuration. I know how to backup all the files, but is there any way to backup and restore IIS settings from the command line? ”

Great question. When using IIS, you eventually get lots of custom settings hiding in there:

IIS Stores all of these settings in what as known as the metabase. It keeps track of the home directory, ISAPI filters, what type of files it will process, etc. How to we back this up?

You can back it up manually from the IIS manager:

But this has a major flaw. It just backs it up to a hidden file on your hard drive. Sure you can find this, and pull it off – but that takes some digging. That won’t help you much when the server is smoking and you want to get another one in its place right away.

How can we automate this process, and be able to grab the file and do what we want with it?

By using a little known VBS file that is included with Windows

It is called IISCnfg.vbs

Before we can use it, get to a command line and type IISCnfg and then enter.

It will give you an error, and then ask if you want to default to use CScript.exe instead of VBScript.exe for your VB Scripts.

Once you say yes, you can start calling it from your batch files or the command line.

There are many options to iiscnfg, but there are a few things that we will require:

-We want to export the settings
-We want all the settings, so we will start at the root and include the children
-We need to set a password on the exported file, or it won’t work on another server (Feature or bug – you decide)
-We want to export the file to a specific location, not the metabase storage area

So here are those requirements translated into arguments:

iiscnfg /export /sp /lm /children /inherited /d [password] /f c:\backup\IISMetabase.bak

The [password] is the password the file will be encrypted with. You will need this to restore it, so don’t forget it!

/sp (Source Path) indicates where in the IIS structure you want to start the backup /lm is at the top of this (I believe lm stands for local machine…someone please write a comment below if I am wrong)

So the above code will take our entire structure and back it up to c:\backup\IISMetabase.bak and then encrypt that file with the password [password]

Put that in your batch file used for backups and you can pull that config any time you want. Keep in mind this only backs up your configuration. Not the files that make up your website or ftp sites.

Later, a new VP of IT walks in and starts plunking around on your web servers

After he “improved” the system, how do you restore the settings?

You get that metabase file from your backups, and import it using a very similar command line:

iiscnfg /import /dp /lm /sp /lm /children /inherited /d [password] /f c:\backup\IISMetabase.bak

Note the /dp (Destination Path) and /sp (Source path). In my example they point to the same place – the top of the IIS settings tree.

Notice the password – it must be the same as the one used to back it up. If you forgot it your hosed. If you forgot to even set a password you might be OK…as long as it is the same system. Otherwise again, your hosed.

That is all there is to it. One line to backup, and one line to restore.

A few days ago a friend of mine called me. He said he had a small problem with his laptop, and was wondering if I could help him over the phone.

You get the idea. Not an easy problem.

He brought the laptop over, and I determined the cause of the blue screen: it was a corrupted registry hive.

Panic started to set in. He needed some word documents he was working on earlier in the day – and needed them for a class he had that night!

I was pretty sure the data was there, but how could we get to it? If it was a desktop machine I could pull the hard drive, and connect it to my machine.

I pulled out an old favorite of mine, BartPE

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
(Scroll down to the middle of the page for the download link)

What is it? BartPE will create a special boot disk that runs a compact version of Windows XP – without any need for a hard drive.

It is perfect for recovery operations like this.

To get Bart PE to build a disk for you, you will need a copy of Windows XP professional. It needs these files from Microsoft to create your boot disk.

You can burn it right from the app, or create an ISO for later use.

I almost forgot the best part – it is free

I built a boot disk from BartPE, and booted his laptop with it. Within moments I was able to copy his important files to a flash drive.

Even better, I was able to go into the c:\windows\restore folder and copy the corrupted hive over to c:\windows\system32\config

Now his system could boot again. He only had to install a few apps again to get it back to normal (The software hive we recovered was a few months old)

I have been using this utility for years. What type of windows boot disk do you use?

It is that time again. Microsoft is getting close to releasing IE 9 in its final form. According to my sources, it will be released on Monday, March 14th.

This also means it will show up in automatic updates as an “Important Update”

If you want to prevent this from happening, you can setup a registry key that will block it.

The key is under this path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\9.0

You will need to create the key above. Once you do that, add this DWORD value:

DoNotAllowIE90

Set it to 1 to block, Set it to 0 to unblock.

We also have updated the free version of Network Administrator to set this key for you – that way you don’t have to mess around with the registry by hand:

Download a free copy from here

One final note – keep in mind this will only prevent it from showing up in Automatic Update. Users can still install IE 9 by hand if they wish.

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