Windows Server

The Server Core variant of Windows Server offers a variety of benefits, especially with respect to security. The downside is that familiar GUI management tools are not always accessible. While Windows PowerShell and the command line offer alternatives, the learning curve can be steep. Device Manager is one example of a common GUI management tool that cannot be used on Server Core. Fortunately, Device Manager can be used remotely. This post explains how to enable remote access with Device Manager on Server Core.

This post includes a sample Windows PowerShell script that will generate a CSV file of host IP addresses based on an input list of host names.

Repeatable, consistent, and predictable are three things that add an incredible amount of value in IT, and building servers from a base image is one way to deliver on this. I was just replying to a thread on a discussion alias where the person who started the thread had reviewed a blog post on how to build such an image for VMWare. I and a number of people disputed the recommendations made in the referenced blog post in addition to the various other things the individual who started the thread was planning to install in his image/template.

At a high level, the most important thing from my reply, I think, is that you should not be customizing a server for it to be convenient to your work style. The server is there for a purpose driven task.

This post includes a sample VBScript that will collect key hardware demographics from a list of hosts and output the results to a CSV file. The demographics collected are:

• Host Name
• Serial Number
• Make
• Model
• BIOS Version
• Operating System
• CPU
• Memory (MB)
• Disk Drives

How many times have you had to figure out what date was X days, months, or years ago, or perhaps what time was Y minutes, hours, or seconds ago? In this post, you'll learn how easy it is to calculate date and time math with Windows PowerShell.

When silently installing WireShark, WireShark's critical dependency, WinPcap, is not installed automatically. This post shows you how to use a tool called AutoIt to develop a script that can silently automate a point and click process like installing WinPcap.

The two scripts below are a quick solution to pushing out an identical (except for IP and hostname) configuration to a large number of Dell DRAC boards. They’re not the most efficient and they were written for a specific scenario, but, they should be easy enough to customize. There are two scripts:

• RemoteDracConfig.vbs – This one will take a config template, customize it for a host, and apply it via psexec
• RemoteDracConfigLoop.vbs – This one will read an input CSV and call RemoteDracConfig.vbs for each line

I seperated the scripts specifically so that the first one could easily be used as part of a build process without having to generate an input file for it. To get started, you’ll need to configure a reference DRAC and export its configuration. Once you’ve done the configuration work, run racadm getconfig –f baseline.txt on the reference machine. You’ll next need to replace the machine specific info with tokens. I support two:

• %drac-ip% – this one will get replaced with the IP to use f…

About eighteen months ago, I how to run Sysprep for Windows Server 2008 and this has turned out to be the most popular article on this site by a long shot, so I figured I'd update it for Windows Server 2008 R2 (and Windows 7). If you never had the need to look at Sysprep in Windows Vista/2008, you'll find that it's nothing like what you're used to on Windows Server 2003, XP, etc.

The first step is acquiring the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) and installing it on a machine. It will run fine on a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 machine. You can get it from Microsoft's website at .

Th…

I ran into a domain controller at a customer today which was completely missing the Windows Time (w32time) service. You can run to recreate the service with default parameters.

I ran into an interesting issue this evening where the Spooler service on a customer's print server was crashing constantly immediately after logging an event about unpublishing a specific printer. Since this was a Windows 2000 machine, troubleshooting this was a bit more involved than usual on 2003.

In general, you troubleshoot these issues by collecting a dump at the time of the process crash with adplus. Adplus is a VBScript available in the package. To start, you'll need the PID of the Spooler process – you can get this from Task Manager. Look for spoolsv.exe, if the PID is missing, go to View>Select Columns to get it. The syntax to attach adplus to the process and wait for it to crash goes like this: .

If you're running under Windows 2000 (or NT4), there is an extra step if you're also connecting to the problem server via Remote Desktop. The extra step here involves another tool in the …

The script goes out to AD and collects all of the printQueue objects in the domain (these represent published printers). From this list the script compiles a list of print servers and dumps all the printer info off each server. The downside to this is that if you have printer servers with no published printers, they'll be missed. This is the data currently collected and outputted to a pipe separated text file:

• Server
• Name
• ShareName
• Comment
• Error
• DriverName
• EnableBIDI
• JobCount
• Location
• PortName
• Published
• Queued
• Shared
• Status

You can easily add more data to this by adding more fields inside the loop. I tested this with some really slow links and Wn2k/Win2k3 servers and it seems to work fine.

In order to use the script, you'll need to provide the FQDN of your domain in the DOMAIN_TO_SEARCH field at the top of the script. Additionally you'll need to optionally modify the FILE_PATH field to change the output destination.

Feel free to leave any suggestions, …