AD Recycle Bin Tool

Last year Windows IT Pro magazine highlighted ADRecycleBin from Overall Solutions. It’s an excellent free utility to bring back deleted items (or reanimate for earlier Active Directory installations than 2008 R2). It’s a very nice alternative to the built-in feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 and is a drastic improvement over item recovery in earlier versions of [...]

WMIC to the Rescue

A recent project had me trying to script the retrieval of the Dell Service Tag. Luckily there’s WMI Command-line to the rescue. From a command line or in a script wmic bios get serialnumber will display or grab the Dell Service Tag. Furthermore, you can use the WMI Command-line to retrieve all kinds of system data and even make [...]

Network Printer Offline

Yesterday I was at a client site where everyone prints directly to the printers, rather than sharing via a print server. One of the PCs kept showing a printer as offline, even though everyone else was printing to it. From the PC you could ping the printer and even browse to the builtin web server [...]

Deploying Your Own Root CA via Group Policy

Although it took some searching, this nugget was quite simple. One of my clients has a Linux Certificate Authority and none of the Windows systems would give an invalid or unknown certificate authority error when visiting a company website that used a cert created by the CA. Get your root certificate ready, then fire up the [...]

Three Free Utilities

Everyone carries around a USB drive these days with a variety of utilities, these three have been very useful in the recent past. CPU-Z – A great utility to find out what kind of memory is installed in a system. This is especially useful when a system is a plain box with out a service [...]

Internet Explorer 8 Released

Internet Explorer 8 was released today. I’m sure it’s already been downloaded a billion times already, but you can get it here. My first impressions have been favorable. I’ve been using Slim Browser for quite some time, but it still uses the IE7 engine and the performance has been lackluster as of late. I’ve stuck [...]

Only one DC?

Okay, maybe this is a soapbox item, but I’ve been to too many companies with only one domain controller. Most of these companies have a full system backup running, but upon complete failure a restore will take a few hours minimum. One such outage and the cost of labor to pay an IT professional to [...]

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