As promised, IntelliAdmin Enterprise Remote Control Beta 1 is now available for download.

For those of you in a hurry, here are bookmarks that will allow you to jump to the information you want

Description

Instructions

Pricing

Download Links

Bug Reports

Description

What is it?

It is a remote administration solution that allows you to find and control computers no matter where they are located. Got a sales team that moves from state to state? As long as they are on the Internet, you can get to their computer in seconds.

No need to look up an IP address, or open firewall ports – best of all, no monthly fees

Lets do an imaginary walk-through.

You are working at an insurance company. A user named Joel moves around to different branches during the day – sometimes he even works at home on his laptop. At any given time he might call you with an issue.

With stand alone remote control software you might have to find his IP address, or open ports on a firewall to get to that computer. Depending on Joel’s ability with the computer – this might take a long time.

With Enterprise remote control it can all be done in a few clicks.

You launch the client, and click the find button:

Start typing the user’s name, and the computer pops right to the top:

Double click, and you are able to see his screen and fix the problem quick.

One thing to note here. This information is updated in real-time. A user logs on to a computer, and within seconds the username is updated in the find window.

What about those laptops that are not connected to your domain? Seems like it would be hard to find those since the user name might be “Owner” or “Dell User”.

Tell the user to click that icon down by the time and they will see an easy to read System-ID:

Just start typing that six digit number into the find window, and you can drill down to that computer in seconds:

This works in the opposite direction too. You could be anywhere with a laptop, and still easily support computers on your network – all through a secured 256 bit AES encrypted connection.

Instructions

Server Setup

So how do you get this thing running on your network? First you need to setup the reflection server. It manages all of the connections. It will be the central point for all remote control activity. Start out by preparing a computer that has a static IP, can Listen on port 443 TCP/UDP, and is reachable by all of the computers you want to control (For example, it is directly on the internet, and port 443 can be reached from a public IP address). You can install the reflector on these versions of Windows: XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7.

Download and install the Enterprise Reflector Server on that computer. You can get a copy of it here

Run the install. A setup wizard will ask you a few questions.

Pick the port that the server will listen on:

I highly recommend staying with port 443. If you want to reach users that are on the road, this port is almost always left open at hotels, coffee shops, and airports.

On the next page you will select the initial user account that will have access. You can pick a Windows user account, or even select a Windows group – then all members of that group will have access. If you don’t want to use a Windows account, you can setup a stand-alone user account:

Click Next, and the server is setup. You can check the status, or manage the server by going to the start menu and clicking on the settings application:

Agent Setup

The agent is installed on the computers you would like to control. Download the agent software from here

During the install, a setup wizard will walk you through the steps:

It will ask for a description of the machine:

These are pre-filled with the settings in Windows. After the agent is installed, you can change them at any time by going into the computer settings on the reflector.

The next page you fill out your reflector settings. Make sure not to forget the port number for your reflection server. See the example in the screen shot below:

The user and password is the account you granted access when setting up the reflection server. Please note that the user and password information is not stored locally on the PC, and is only used to register the computer.

Press next, and the agent will register itself. After you press finish, the agent will startup and try to go online.

The agent will show its status by the color of the icon down by the time. If it is blue, then it is online with the reflector. If it is red, it is still trying to connect:

The beta is currently limited to 100 agents. Don’t think you will be installing that many yet, since when beta 2 comes out you will need to upgrade them manually to get the automatic update feature.

Client Setup

Great. You have your reflector setup, and at least one agent connected. How do we get to it? By installing the remote control client.

You can get your copy of the beta here

Install the client, and launch. Go to the settings button, and click on the “Reflector” Tab:

Enter the IP address or host name of your reflector server. Be sure to include the port by putting a colon and the port number after the IP address – the client is not smart enough yet to default to 443

The username and password is the account you setup when installing the reflector. Click OK, and now you can connect.

Simply click on the Find button, and your agent will show up.

Double click on it to connect.

Congratulations. Your setup is complete. Now you can remotely administer those computers from anywhere you can find an Internet Connection.

Pricing

This is the first question many of you asked when we announced the beta. Right now, almost all of the competing products are service based, and require a monthly fee.

With our Enterprise Remote Control, you pay a one time fee to purchase the software, and then run it yourself. No monthly fees that will break the bank.

Lets look at what some of the big boys charge:

Big Competitor #1: From $49 a PC to $40 a PC, depending on volume, per year
Big Competitor #2: From $179 a pc to $100 a PC, depending on volume, per year
Big Competitor #3: From $39 a pc to $50 a pc, depending on volume, per year.

So if you had 20 computers. It could easily run from $1000 to almost $4000 – per year!

Note that these are monthly payments that go on forever. Yes, they do provide a service for you, but what if you want to run it yourself? You got the server, the bandwidth, the smarts. Why pay a monthly fee?

Here is the pricing – only for beta testers, and at any time we could stop this deal, so get it while you can.

If you pre-order a license, before the beta ends, you can get an unlimited license for $599 US. No limits on the number of computers. A flat fee of $599, and you can get to those computers without ever paying a monthly fee again.

After the final version is released, the pricing will be per computer, and will start at $59 per computer.

Visit our online store to purchase a license today

Downloads

Reflector Server: Download Now

Client: Download Now

Warning: This beta does not include an automatic update for the agent. It is quite possible you will need to re-install the agent on all computers in the final release. Keep that in mind when deploying this software. You will need to upgrade by hand. Beta 2 will include an automatic update

Bug Reports

This is the first beta, so we will be expecting those bug reports to come flooding in.

Please send them to:

beta@intelliadmin.com

That way we will get them in our bug tracking system and we can start working on them right away.

Lately many of you have been emailing us about getting our Remote Control product to work with Windows 7.

If you install the agent manually, or via an MSI group policy – not much to do, it should work right out of the box. Many of you like that automatic install feature, and Microsoft has put some roadblocks in your way to keep this from working.

Let me walk you through what you need to do to get this to work.

The first thing we need to allow access to is 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.

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 allow access to the admin share 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.

Now, we need to make sure the remote registry service is set to automatic and is started. Again, like the admin share, this is on the computer you want to control.

You need to open the service manager. You can do this by clicking on the start button, and typing “services.msc”. It should show up in the top of your start menu.

Click on it, and a window will open. Scroll down until you find the service named “Remote Registry”:

Right click on it, and go to properties. Change the service to automatic, and start it up:

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 the automatic install feature will work under Windows 7.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article about an error that you get in Outlook when you have too many attachments of the same name:

Even Outlook 2010 has this problem.

In the article, I walk you through deleting these files by hand.

It is not an easy thing to do. You need to open the registry, find a key…then use that key to find a random folder name.

I thought it would be cool if we could build a utility that would do this for you. So, that is what we did:

It will automatically scan your registry, find all Microsoft Outlook attachments, and then display them to you in the main window.

If it all looks like stuff you want to remove, you just hit the “Clean Up” button and it will delete them for you.

Here comes the bonus. You can run it silently from the command line.

What would you need that for?

You might have user that opens lots of attachments, and runs into this bug all the time.

Here is how you can have it run without any prompts:

OutlookCleanup.exe /SILENT


It will quietly scan through your registry and find the temp folder and empty it. Throw this in a batch file and have it run at logon – you will never have to deal with this problem again.

Another thought came to mind while working on this: This is a security problem too.

While email is on your Exchange server…it is relatively secure. Not knowing this you might open a sensitive document, read it, and when you are finished – delete it. Unknown to you, Outlook has just made a copy of it and it is sitting right there on your hard drive. Waiting for someone to grab.

Until MS provides a fix, you can use this little utility to keep your Outlook attachments clean. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for an update – this bug has been around since 2002.

Get your copy from our free downloads page

One of the problems with a stand alone remote control product like ours, is that many times it is difficult to get to the machine you are trying to control.

Why is that? If every machine that you needed to support was sitting on your local network, it would be simple to reach them all. Just get the IP or host name, and you are good to go.

The real world is not that simple. You might have someone at customer’s location, or your sales team just arrived in another part of the country, and they need you to remote in and make a simple fix.

They are plenty of services out there that will charge you a hefty monthly rate to have this type of access. And I bet some of you are using them right now.

What if you could get that same level of connectivity, but run it all yourself with no monthly charges?

Sound interesting?

Glad you are interested. For the last 18 months we have been working non stop on a new product that will allow you to remote control machines behind almost any type of firewall. The product is in three parts: An agent is installed on the computers you want to control, the client is what you control them with, and a third piece of software, the reflection server, manages everything.

The reflection server was written with high performance in mind. It is very light on CPU usage, and when connecting clients it calculates the best pathway to a machine. It will try its best to hand off the connection so it does not have to handle the bandwidth:

Keeping in line with our focus on remote administration for IT departments, the reflection server supports Active Directory and allows you to manage access to all computers in one simple interface:

Users and groups can be locked down. For example, you might want to grant “View only” privileges to a specific group, or you might have a policy that requires permission before connecting. Set it at the reflector, and it is immediately applied to all agents out in the field.

What about finding those computers? When the agent is running on a PC, it will notify the reflection server any time someone logs in. Within seconds of a user logging into a system, the find window in the client will be updated with their username.

What is this good for? Lets say a user calls and you have no idea what machine they have logged into – but they still need your help. Just go to the find window and start typing out their username. The machine will come right to the top:

And remember – that computer could be on your local network, across town, or on the other side of the world, and you would still be able to get to it in seconds. No IP addresses, no port forwarding. The reflector takes care of it all.

What if that machine is on a workgroup, and the user account is something like “DELL USER”, or “OWNER”? We have added a time saving feature in those situations. Just have the user click on the icon down by the time and read off a simple 6 digit number:

Type that ID in the find window of the client, and the PC will show up at the top in seconds:

Once you have found the PC you want to connect to, the client will talk to the reflection server and together they will make a calculation on the best possible route to the machine. It won’t do silly things like route through the reflection server for a computer that is right across from you on your network, and at the same time it will do amazing things like connect directly to a PC that is behind a firewall – without running through the reflection server.

Want to try out a beta? Click below to join our newsletter and you will be the first to be notified when the beta is released in two weeks:

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If you have ever had to reload your system, then you know the pain of trying to find all of your drivers.

I ran across a free tool called “Driver Backup”

It allows you to backup all of your current drivers, and it will even generate a special install script that you can run to automatically install them.

To use it, start out by downloading it from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/

Extract the files, and run the main executable. It will show you all of the drivers it finds on your system. I ran it on a new Windows 7 x64 install:

Select the folder you want to backup your drivers to, and pick your options:

Select the option to generate a automatic install script. I highly recommend it since it makes the restore process a breeze.

Click backup, and it zooms through your drivers and copies them to the destination folder:

When it is finished, each driver is saved to a folder. That way, you can easily identify them:

If you picked the option I recommended above, it will also have an easy to use script that you can run to restore your drivers automatically:

Run it, and it will prompt you to restore them:

Awesome little utility. I will be using it after I get my drivers installed on a new system. Burn it to a DVD, and tape it to the side of the box. That way a format & reload will be a little less painful.

I got a question from Mark last week:

“Steve, I was wondering if you could add a plugin to Network Administrator that would disable control panel access. I know it is not the best way to keep people out, but it would save me a lot of headaches”

Actually, I have gotten a few requests for this. Disabling control panel access is actually quite easy. If you drill down to this registry key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

You just need to add a DWORD value of NoControlPanel, and set it to 1:

Windows 7 handles this smoothly. See my start menu before the change:

After the change, the control panel option is missing:

XP is not as nice, it keeps the icon…but you get a nasty message when clicking on it:

We added a plugin to Network Administrator. That way you can easily make the change without plunking around in the registry, plus you can push it remotely against machines on your network:

You can get your free download from here:

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

Disabling the control panel won’t keep everyone out, but in some situations it can really help.

Even with the huge amount of space that I have, I am always running out. When that happens I start digging.

Usually I wait through this:

If you have more than just a few folders, it can be a huge waste of time.

I ran across a free tool from Microsoft called “Disk Usage”

You can download it from here

It is a command line tool. Point it at any folder, and get the same information:

With one catch – it is much faster than using Windows Explorer

For example, I went to the properties of a development folder on our server. It took 1 minute and 10 seconds to get the total size.

With Disk Usage it took 15 seconds.

The next part I am about to show you is even better. It is the real reason I love this tool. If you use the -v option, it will show you a breakdown of how much each sub folder is taking up:

Now with a quick glance, I can see what folders are taking up the most space. From there I can investigate and clean out anything that is not needed.

I was not a big fan of the new start menu in Windows 7, and Vista. Especially since Microsoft made it impossible to switch back.

Over time I grew to like it.

What about those users who aren’t on the computer every day? Many of them have a hard enough time just getting the computer to do what they want. When faced with a forced upgrade to Windows 7, wouldn’t it be great if they could have their comfy old start menu?

Or what if you just like the original start menu?

A reader, Scott, turned me on to an open source project named Classic Shell. This free app works nicely on Vista, and Windows 7. It almost feels like Microsoft had put it into Windows.

You can get it from here:

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

Very simple install, just run the setup and immediately your start menu changes:

They have a few themes too – if you want to go old school, and make it look like the Windows 2000 menu – no problem:

The great part is that the same old shortcuts work too. For the longest time after switching to Vista, I would hit the start menu, and press up twice, and then enter.

This would bring the run window up in XP. In Vista / Windows 7 it launches the app at the bottom of the start menu – Now with the classic shell, I can have my old habit back

A friend of mine forgot his password for his Windows 7 computer, and needed to get back into it. I remembered years ago when I was working as a contractor, there was a little Linux utility that would allow you to boot from a floppy and reset windows passwords

Lucky for him, that utility is still around, and it has been updated to work with Windows 7, and Windows 2008.

It is called the “Offline NT Password & Registry Editor”

The website can be found here:

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

First, if you are going to use this utility, a word of warning. If a user has EFS encrypted files, and you reset their password, those files will become junk and you will never be able to open them again.

To reset passwords, download the latest zip from the website above, and open it up. There will be an ISO file that you can burn to a CD.

Boot to it, and you will see all kinds of commands scream across the screen. Then you need to answer some questions.

First, it will ask which drive your Windows install is on. You can see the drives and the selection numbers here:

Then it will ask you for the registry location. Just pick the default by pressing enter:

Now that it has all the info it needs, you select your action. We want to reset a password – so we pick the default by pressing enter (Password Reset)

And finally, what we have been looking for – editing the user data. Notice it has a registry editor too. Something that can come in handy with other issues. So pick the first option by pressing enter:

Then pick the user account you want to edit (Usually you can just hit enter here too – since administrator is usually the default)

OK. Here is where you need to stop and pay attention. Every option so far has been the default, and you could select it by hitting enter. If you don’t watch carefully…the final option that you want (clearing the password) is *not* selected by default. Quit is.

I am not the brightest bulb in the bunch, and I ran through it a few times by just hitting enter all the way through…and then tried to get in with no password. Grrr Not working. Until I slowed down and read each step, I realized my mistake.

Pick the clear password option. Option 1. Avoid the temptation to reset the password, and set to a new value. Many times this does not work. Just clear it, login with an empty password, and then you can reset once you are back in windows.

Notice too that you can elevate, and unlock accounts – comes in handy when users forget their password, and lock themselves out.

Can’t tell you how many times this little gem helped me look like a hero back in my contracting days. Glad to see it is still alive and kicking.

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