Networking

Using NTBackup Without Having to Manage the Media

The RSM (Removable Storage Management) requires to manually manage media, when performing a NTBackup.
I would like to show a script, that allows to forget about this (DO NOT FORGET TO CHANGE TAPEs ; ) )

Here is a script:

@echo Off
RSM.exe refresh /LF”Hewlett Packard LTO Ultrium-3 drive”
@Echo Please Wait…

for /f “Tokens=1-4 Delims=/ ” %%i in (’date /t’) do  set dt=%%i-%%j-%%k-%%l
for /f “Tokens=1″ %%i in (’time /t’) do set tm=-%%i

set tm=%tm::=-%
set dtt=%dt%%tm%

TechNet Magazine Online: October Edition

Virtualization: An Introduction to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008
The introduction of Hyper-V makes virtualization an even more compelling solution for IT environments. Get an overview of today’s virtualization market and see how Hyper-V improves the manageability, reliability, and security of virtualization.

Virtualization: Manage Your Virtual Environments with VMM 2008
System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides a consolidated interface for managing your virtual infrastructure. The latest version adds support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, as well as for VMware virtual machines. Explore the new features and get an overview of using VMM to centralize your management tasks.

Virtualization: Getting Started with Microsoft Application Virtualization
Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) allows you to deliver virtualized desktops to client systems throughout your organization. This simplifies system management and liberates employees from their desktops. Take a close look at how App-V works and discover how you can deploy it in your organization.

Virtualization: Achieving High Availability for Hyper-V
Consolidating servers onto fewer physical machines has many advantages, but it is extremely important that you plan for your systems to be highly available. Here’s a guide to using Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering to bring high availability to your Hyper-V virtual machines.

Virtualization: Backup and Disaster Recovery for Server Virtualization
Virtualization brings significant changes to disaster recovery. Here’s an introduction to how the Microsoft virtualization platform factors into your disaster recovery plan, as well as a deeper look into backup and restore options and considerations for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

Virtualization: Essential Tools for Planning Your Virtual Infrastructure
Is your infrastructure ready for virtualization? The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, a network-wide infrastructure assessment tool, can help you better understand your IT infrastructure and determine whether your systems are ready for upgrade or migration to a variety of technologies, including virtualization.

Continue at: blogs.technet.com

Cheap (FREE) and Good SAN / iSCSI Storage - OpenFiler SAN Server

If you want to work / test / learn many of the VMware ESX Server advanced features, like VMotion, VMware High Availability (VMHA), and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), you should have SAN (Storage Area Network).

For my Home Lab I’m using OpenFiler. You can find a very good Step-By-Step tutorial about OpenFiler at well know Petri.co.il web site. Article by David Davis - “Use OpenFiler as your Free VMware ESX SAN Server“

I just want to add one small part to this tutorial. I think it’s not the best idea to use IP address from DHCP on Server, a specially on SAN :). So, I’ve configured my SAN to use static IP. Here is how to do that:

Full story at source: http://app-v.ca/

SecTor Conference is looking for speakers.

SecTor 2008 is currently open to speaking proposals.  Visit http://www.sector.ca/ to learn more about the event. SecTor is all about the meat — The content that matters to Canadian IT Security Professionals today.  The key to SecTor’s success, and thus the primary objective of the Management Committee and Advisory Committee, is quality content and presentation for attendees.

How to Sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0

If you try to sequence Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 (I’ve tried to do this in SoftGrid 4.5 RC) you will get a error and inside error report you will find “Code: 0×0000000000000000” and a lot of other, not very usefull information about this error.

Full Story At Source, App-V.ca

“Outlook Anywhere” and problems with IPv6 in Windows Server 2008

It’s not a secret, that IPv6 has some “issues”. When I’ve been in Seattle, at last MVP summit, a lot of IT professionals said that, and all of them recommended to disable IPv6 on Windows 2008 or / and Vista machines. Kevin Reeuwijk from “Innovative Technology Weblog” posted a very good article; Outlook Anywhere is ‘broken’ on IPv6 in Windows Server 2008.
So, if you run Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 and want to use Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC over HTTP) you probably get a problem. It would not work if the RPC-over-HTTP Proxy and the Exchange Mailbox installed on the same Windows 2008 Server.
To make the long story short, simply unselect IPv6 from the properties of your NIC AND (it’s very important) make a changes to the HOSTS file. Simply open up your hosts file and make the following changes:

• Comment out the line “:::1    localhost”
• Add the following two lines:

         <IPv4 address>    <hostname of the computer>
<IPv4 address>    <FQDN of the computer>

This will resolve all queries for your computer’s name to its IPv4 address, effectively disabling the use of IPv6 for self-communication. You can confirm that this works by doing a “telnet localhost 6004″.

Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer

Quite old (released 10/2/2007) but very powerful and useful tool, Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer. Additionally, I discovered that many IT Admins are not using it. The Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer reads an Active Directory configuration using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), and then automatically generates a Visio diagram of your Active Directory and /or your Exchange 200x Server topology. The diagramms include domains, sites, servers, administrative groups, routing groups and connectors and can be changed manually in Visio if needed.

Remote Desktop Connection 6.1 (RDP 6.1) on Windows XP WITHOUT SP3. RDP 6.1 on Win XP with SP2

Recently, on one Windows 2008 I’ve installed a Terminal Server Role and did a TS Web Apps. Really nice feature, you can get access to application through web interface, exactly how it’s done on Citrix, but by using Windows 2008 you not requested to buy a Citrix ;). Yes, TS Web Apps from Windows 2008 is a nice, but to get access to this application, on a client side should be installed RDP 6.1 client. This particular version of RDP cames with SP3 for Windows XP or with SP1 for Windows Vista. I have no idea why Microsoft doesn’t provide RDP 6.1 as separate package.
In my case I couldn’t install XP SP3 or Vista SP1 on every machine in Network, so I’ve found a workaround. The first step is to install a RDP 6.0. After that we need to get few files from XP SP3 or Vista SP1. Create anywhere on your disk directory, let’s say RDP6_1 and put there the following files:

lhmstsc.mui
lhmstscx.mui
mstsc.chm
mstsc.exe
mstsc.exe.mui
mstscax.dll

Inside RDP6_1 create directory en-us and put there the following files:

aaclient.dll.mui
mstsc.exe.mui
mstscax.dll.mui

NOTE: Remember to take all mentioned files from Windows XP SP3 or from Windows Vista SP1.

Now inside RDP6_1 create a batch update.bat. Here is a content of update.bat :

del c:\windows\$ntservicepackuninstall$\mstsc.exe
del c:\windows\$ntuninstallkb925876$\mstsc.exe
del c:\windows\servicepackfiles\i386\mstsc.exe
del c:\windows\system32\mstsc.exe
del c:\windows\system32\dllcache\mstsc.exe
del c:\windows\lastgood\system32\mstsc.exe

del c:\windows\$ntservicepackuninstall$\mstscax.dll
del c:\windows\$ntuninstallkb925876$\mstscax.dll
del c:\windows\servicepackfiles\i386\mstscax.dll
del c:\windows\system32\mstscax.dll
del c:\windows\system32\dllcache\mstscax.dll
del c:\windows\lastgood\system32\mstscax.dll

copy mstsc.exe c:\windows\$ntservicepackuninstall$\mstsc.exe
copy mstsc.exe c:\windows\$ntuninstallkb925876$\mstsc.exe
copy mstsc.exe c:\windows\servicepackfiles\i386\mstsc.exe
copy mstsc.exe c:\windows\system32\mstsc.exe
copy mstsc.exe c:\windows\system32\dllcache\mstsc.exe
copy mstsc.exe c:\windows\lastgood\system32\mstsc.exe

copy mstscax.dll c:\windows\$ntservicepackuninstall$\mstscax.dll
copy mstscax.dll c:\windows\$ntuninstallkb925876$\mstscax.dll
copy mstscax.dll c:\windows\servicepackfiles\i386\mstscax.dll
copy mstscax.dll c:\windows\system32\mstscax.dll
copy mstscax.dll c:\windows\system32\dllcache\mstscax.dll
copy mstscax.dll c:\windows\lastgood\system32\mstscax.dll

xcopy *.* c:\windows\system32 /e /y
regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\mstscax.dll /s

Update.bat should be run after installation of RDP 6.0
Now, you can navigate to your TS Web Access and run RemoteApp Program.

AccessChk v4.1

Mark Russinovich released a new very nice tool for IT Pro (System Administrators), AccessChk v4.1.
Windows administrators often need to know what kind of accesses specific users or groups have to resources including files, directories, Registry keys, global objects and Windows services. AccessChk quickly answers these questions with an intuitive interface and output.

Examples

The following command reports the accesses that the Power Users account has to files and directories in \Windows\System32:

accesschk “power users” c:\windows\system32

This command shows which Windows services members of the Users group have write access to:

accesschk users -cw *

To see what Registry keys under HKLM\CurrentUser a specific account has no access to:

accesschk -kns austin\mruss hklm\software

To see the security on the HKLM\Software key:

accesschk -k hklm\software

To see all files under \Users\Mark on Vista that have an explicit integrity level:

accesschk -e -s c:\users\mark

To see all global objects that Everyone can modify:

accesschk -wuo everyone \basednamedobjects

Sysinternals Live - Execute Sysinternals Tools Directly from the Web

The Beta of Sysinternals Live was announced today. A service that enables you to execute Sysinternals Tools directly from the web without manually downloading them. Enter a tool’s Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname>
View the entire Sysinternals Live Tools directory in a browser at http://live.sysinternals.com.