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 [...]
Microsoft Learning Snacks
You may have guessed it already, but they’re bite-sized videos for learning quite a few of Microsoft’s products. Click here for a full list of what’s available, all that is required is Silverlight for viewing. I’m currently watching the eleven videos for Windows 7, part of my studies for an upcoming certification exam, and they’ve [...]
Where the 32-bit Programs Hide in the Registry
Trying to increase the speed of a Windows system typically involves disabling Services, removing items from the Startup menu and deleting Registry entries under Run, in both the Current User and Local Machine trees. The latter bit is what was missing when working on 64-bit systems. After noticing that the pesky Acrobat Speed Launcher and [...]
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 [...]
Free Windows Server 2008 R2 eBook
Well if this isn’t the week for free books… Now there is a free eBook download from Microsoft: Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2. The “Introducing” series of MS Press books are hardly a technical treatise on whatever subject they happen to cover, but in my opinion, free information regarding their latest products is always a good thing. [...]
Service ‘MSExchangeTransport’ failed
A few months ago I had an Exchange Server 2007 install stop cold, caughing up this error: Error: Service ‘MSExchangeTransport’ failed to reach status ‘Running’ on this server. Apparently if you disable IPv6 on a Windows Server 2008 the error will occur. Not to be picky, but how many networks are actually using IPv6 and why is [...]
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