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 Active Directory with a great GUI interface.

They have a couple of other interesting products in Maven, ResetPass and Action Engine, not everything is free, but it’s close.

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 configuration changes. Rob van der Woude‘s great site on scripting has a great primer and examples on using WMIC. TechNet Magazine also has a very useful article on gathering system data using WMIC in your environment.

Finally, checkout the WMI Admin Tools pack. It contains more than I want to type about here, but it gives you the ability to browse the various objects, classes and properties, plus a custom event viewer and much more. Check it out and make your (administrative) life better.

After chewing on this for quite a while, I found the issue: a checkbox on the Ports tab “SNMP Status Enabled”, which when checked (along with SNMP turned off on the print device) will result in the printer being listed as Offline. Once the box was unchecked, it was back online and the customer was back to printing once again.

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 Group Policy Management Console (or gpmc.msc). Either create a new group policy or use the Default Domain Policy to deploy it to every system.

Right-click the policy of your chosing and select Edit… go to Computer Configuration > (Policies, if you are using Windows 2008 ) > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Public Key Policies > Trusted Root Certification Authorities, right-click and choose Import… and using the import wizard browse over to your root certificate and you are done.

Within a few days most computers on the domain should have the certificate, aside from the stragglers who never seem to be on the network.

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 tag or serial number.  And it’s really annoying to open a box only to find the memory is without a label.

Magic Jelly Bean – This little gem has been in my toolbox for a long time. It grabs the key codes for popular software installed on a system (Adobe, VMWare, Office) including the OS. This is very useful if you have a disk, but lost your installation key or have lots of keys and don’t know which ones were used on a particular system.

Wireless Key View - And finally, this tool grabs the WPA/WEP wireless key(s) from a Windows system (must be using the built-in Windows wireless utility) when you can’t see the actual text or log into your wireless router.

And while you’re visiting these sites, check out the other free software they have. You’ll have your 32GB thumb drive filled up in no time ;)

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 with Slim Browser over the last couple of years due to features like double-clicking tabs to close sites and not having multiple browser windows open when going from an internal to external site. These items seem to have been addressed in IE8 and so far I’m impressed with speed and functionality. Try it out (Windows users) it’s free.

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 restore a domain controller is about break-even, with an example price of $700+  for a Windows Server license and the cost of a cheap server or desktop. That of course doesn’t really cover the true cost; if you have a company of twenty-five employees sitting around waiting for the server to come back online, now you’re really talking money. With another domain controller present (with sufficient resources), the clients may never even notice the difference should a primary system fail.

Unfortunately, many small companies look at the short term cost of items rather than focusing on the immense cost of a prolonged outage or lost productivity with subpar equipment or dated technology. But in tough economic times many of these choices are made for them.

Ps. Check out NetWrix’s array of Freeware.

On a production machine, I consider the Shutdown Event Tracker worthwhile, especially in environments with multiple administrators. When in a lab situation or testing environment, this prompt before shutdown gets old quickly. 

To change the setting go to Start > Run…, type gpedit.msc and press OK.

Drill down: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates and highlight System. In the right pane, double-click the “Display Shutdown Event Tracker” and choose Disabled.

You’re done, no more need for a reason to shutdown the system. (BTW, this tip works with Windows Server 2003 and you can even enable the Shutdown Event Tracker for Windows 7, Vista and XP.)

This is a very critical update due to the fact your system can be affected by just visiting a website.

Go to Windows Update and patch your system!