Display the up time of a workstation or server.

Do you ever need command line access to see how long a machine has been up for? This morning I did. I needed to prove that a machine was up last night at 3 am when a critical process was going down. Someone flucked up and it sure wasn't me! So...

Using one of my favorite command line commands NET I will show you quickly how to display your Windows up-time:

net statistics workstation

This will show you a similar screen to this:



The first line across the top shows when the machine was last rebooted along with some other geeky goodness. Do you have an easier/quicker/more obscure way of doing this?

_TheObscureAdmiN_

Can I Open The Task Manager Without A Mouse?

You sure can! If you find yourself mouse-less You can pull up the task manager in any Windows version 2000 or better with...

Control-Shift-Escape

_TheQuickPostin'AdmiN_

Display a Start Up Message in Windows XP before logging in.

Before someone logs into your machine a message can be displayed. This is meant to inform you that you are being monitored or you are bound by some formal code of conduct.



You can use it to display a message in your absence to remind your buddies you are an all knowing Admin. You can do it pretty easily by displaying what Microsoft refers to as a legal notice at system start up.

• GO TO RUN
• REGEDIT
• Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system]
• Change legalnoticecaption"="Legal Notice"
• legalnoticetext="AskTheAdmin is watching you."

obviously you can replace Legal notice or AskTheAdmin is watching you with any text you want. The editors over here are pretty sure you can find some Funny Practical uses for this on your, or a public, PC...

_TheAlwaysWatchingAdmiN_

I have hundres of files to rename help me Admin!

Yes, we know you have taken a million digital photos over the last year, on your fancy shmancy new camera. And we also know the summer is in full swing. Being the geek that you are, you could not just leave your pictures named digital_image_13456.jpg ...

We just couldn't have that now, could we?

Oh, how well we have got to know you.

Wayne from Florida wants AtA's help to create a script that will batch rename his purty pictures.Today is your lucky day Wayne - we are going to point you to some FREE software our good friend Daniel at HackYourDay blogged about.

The software is called Batch File Renamer (clever eh?) from Cerebral Synergy.

Daniel says:

Here’s one software that productivity nuts will love. If you’ve ever needed to catalog files, change extensions, add something to a filename in large batches you know the suffering that is “right click, select, type, enter” done over and over and over again. If you need a tool that can simply edit filenames, rename extensions and so on in a very powerful, customizable way, read on!...

I set out to find some sort of tool because I need to catalog files in batches of 100 about every two days. I get a batch of stuff in txt format and I need to do the following operations.

• I need the files to be in the following format [ID - Number.txt]
• I also need them in this format [ID - Number.html]

Practically this means that I need “032 - 001.txt”, “032 - 002.txt” and so on (all the way to 100), also in .html format and I need to be able to customize all of this because for the next batch I will need “033″ at the beginning.

Doing a Google search and trying a lot of free software that popped up I finally found Batch File Renamer. Not a fancy name, not a fancy program, but it gets the job done better than I’ve seen with other apps. First, head over to the Cerebral Synergy download page, scroll down and download Batch File Renamer.

He was able to change file extensions, mass change file names and it comes with all sorts of other free geeky options!

Check out Daniel's article at HackYourDay here and the Free Cerebral Synergy download is here.

_TheRenameThisAdmiN_

Windows Quick Tip: Set up keyboard shortcuts for your most used icons.

It’s very annoying and counter productive for your hands to leave the keyboard as you use your mouse to click, click, clickity click click away at something. Join the ranks of power users to add keyboard shortcuts for every computer task you do. Yup Any Task!

Built into Windows is the ability to let you assign a keyboard command to any shortcut icon. Just right-click the shortcut you want to assign a Shortcut to, click Properties, and click in the ‘Shortcut key’ field. Then press the combo you want to assign to launch the shortcut.

Also, did you know that the Windows Key-R launched the Run box and Windows Key-E opens Windows Explorer? Consider yourself more productive!

And of course you remember AtA's lock your computer dumb fast with Windows Key-L.

Are you feeling that productivity boost?

_YourProductiveAdmiN_

Windows Tip: Access The Windows Security Window In a Remote Desktop Connection (Control-Alt-Delete Doesn't Work)

I get asked all the time how the hell do I bring up the security box (control + alt + delete) in a remote desktop session and here is the answer:

To use Control + Alt + Delete in a Remote Desktop Connection terminal, use Ctrl + Alt + End instead.

I tested it and it works beautifully on two Windows XP machines, 1 2003 server but on remoting in (What I can't make up words??) to my Windows XP Pro SP2 Laptop it only brought up the task manager.

Any ideas?

And for those of you that don't know Control + Shift + Escape opens you directly to the task manager. And you can alt + tab through tabs on your remote desktop if it is opened full screen.

Got some good shortcuts for us? Tips at askTheAdmin dot com! I am off to my data center today. Should be interesting as we prepare for impending doom upcoming upgrades.

_TheShortcutingAdmiN_

Why can my Vista Sidebar only hold a small number of gadgets?

When I first heard about the Windows Vista Sidebar way back when I was very excited. I thought Wowie, (yeah i say wowie and I give High-Five all the time too - What?!?) I am going to get every widget possible into my sidebar and be uber productive. (edit: I might be over exaggerating - just a little :) )

Then at first glance, the Windows Sidebar looked as though it can hold only a few widgets/gadgets. So much for the uber convenience I was looking for. When you fill up your Sidebar, adding another gadget makes the one on the bottom disappear, requiring you to delete a visible one to bring it back.

But as it turns out the Sidebar has more than one screen. When more than the visible number of gadgets are in use, the excess gadgets flow out onto another screen. The arrows at the top of the Sidebar take you from one screen to another. Even your less-used gadgets can be just one click away.

So what are your favorite "Gadgets"? Edit:(I still have this urge to call them Widgets.)

Send your tips in to tips at askTheAdmin dot com or hit us up in the comments! Your comment might just get you some swag!

_TheWidgetCrazyAdmiN_

Is there a way to reference cell ranges by label in Excel?

Jacob asked us if he could reference a whole cell range by label in excel. He continued on with how much easier it would make his life. Jacob today's your lucky day because it looks like you can!

You can reference a column by its header or label. This is wonderful and had more than a few of my end users jumping for joy! It works in OpenOffice as well as most Pc versions and on the Mac!

While you're writing formulas in Excel, you can refer to cell ranges not only by hard-to-read row and column numbers and letters but by label. So instead of totaling a column using =SUM(B2:B5), you can write the formula =SUM('Widgets Cranked'). After I mentioned this is a nice feature in Apple's new spreadsheet application Numbers '08, reader Dustin pointed out that it's available in Excel as well, just not turned on by default. To enable it, in the Tools>Options dialog, the Calculation tab, check off "Accept labels in formulas." Thanks, Dustin! [Via LifeHacker]

_TheExcelingAdmiN_

How can I backup the information I cant see before formatting A Windows Box?

Every time a machine gets put in front of me that needs to be formatted I first have to backup all the user's personal data. I can't see their passwords for their IM or Email accounts - So how can I retrieve it? We have covered programs that reveal the password behind the Asterisks before but this goes much further. Check out what we can backup with this method:

• Documents/Pictures/Music Collections
  
• Mail Settings (Accounts, Passwords, Address Book etc.
  
• Dialup & VPN Setting.
  
• Messengers Accounts
  
• Windows & Applications License Keys.
  
• and much more...

Data such as Documents and Media files are simple to backup. But how can I know what's behind those asterisks to save their passwords? You ask how can I collect all those licenses and other hidden data ???? And how can we do it FAST and efficient? We definitely don't want to end up like lost password Lucy below...

Well, the solution comes from a great site for small and useful freeware utilities called NirSoft. The site includes many utilities that reveals your precious information. It's like the missing piece of the puzzle. Some of us have used the Windows documents and settings migration tools - but this is so much better.

But wait! What I need to satisfy the inner admin in me IS - Automation !!

So I've collected some of the utilities, added my own batch script and packed it all to an automated self-extracted archive called: SaveMyData


When you run it, this batch will:

• Collect all your private settings.
  
• Export the data to text files.
  
• Save the files in a Backup folder in your system drive.
  

The Settings includes:

Mail Settings, VPN & Dialups Passwords, Product Keys, Messengers Passwords , IE AutoComplete Passwords, Network Passwords, Wireless Networks Keys (WEP/WPA)

* note: one of the tools (Pspv) exports the data to a Text file and also to a Data file that can later be manually imported back using that same tool.

I know that these utilities drastically changed the amount of time I need to dedicate to the pre-format actions.

I sure hope it will help you guys too :-)

Cheers,
YaronM

Outlook 2002 and earlier have a 2gb limit I exceeded... Now What?

Johnathan from Minnesota writes in:

My IT manager uses Office XP aka 2002. His outlook pst just touched over 2gb. It happened while Outlook was opened and it closed. He couldn't open it again. I looked up the error message on Microsoft and they said Outlook XP (and outlook 2000) can not recognize a pst larger than 2gb. There is a truncate tool and FIXPST tool. I tried using the first and cut it down about 50mb. This says it kills stuff from the end of the file - but what can i do?

I then ran FIXPST and it fails at the last step. HELP!! I read this from a Microsoft KB here.

Errors have been detected in the file . Quit all mail-enabled applications, and then use the Inbox Repair Tool.

So for our final answer: You can upgrade to any newer version of Outlook to fix your problem (big Surprise!) or crop your pst and then run fixpst. It is very time consuming and will eat some of your messages (Hence Croping). And then there is that 3rd party app that Billy Gates suggested called RecoveryToolbox if you can not deal with losing data.

So Remember OUTLOOK 2002/XP BAD!! 2GB PST FILE LIMIT!

_TheOffToUpgradeAdmiN_

What are Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files? Can I delete them? Do I need them and how can i make them stop coming back?

James from Virginia wanted to know if it was safe to delete these Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files from his network. Check out our answer and step by step removal tips.

Running in a mixed Windows/Mac environment I find it annoying to deal with all the little artifacts the great OS's leave behind. All of our mixed shares and network drives are full of these frickin 'Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files.

I hate them so much.

Each folder with initiated thumbnail views (that is where they have displayed a Thumbnails or Filmstrip view in Windows Explorer) will have a Thumbs.db file.

They do nothing for me. I look at them like litter on the ground. I looked up what they do and started deleting them. But they came back...

Some times I get caught up in doing something after in enrages me enough. So I was now determined to get rid of these files from my shares here on out. I did some research on how to get rid of them permanently and how to prevent them from coming back!

Here is how you prevent Windows and OS X from creating these annoying files.

Prevent the creation of Thumbs.db in Windows:

From “My Computer” click on the “Tools” menu item

Click on “Folder Options”, and the folder options dialog will appear

Click on the “View” tab

Check the “Do not cache thumbnails” option

Prevent the creation of .DS_Store files on Network volumes in MacOS:

• Open the Terminal application from the Utilities folder which is nested in the Applications folder
• In the newly opened terminal type (all on one line) defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
• Restart the computer for the change to take effect


Now this doesn’t help you deleting the files that already may exist.

To accomplish that you may be interested in BlueHarvest to scrub your network of .DS_Store files and you can do a simple find and replace on Windows.

Find and Replace:

To delete all the existing Thumbs.db files on your computer you just:

• Begin by first clicking on the Start Button
  
• Then click on Search and then Click on the All files and folders option
  
• In the All or part of the file name: box type in Thumbs.db
  
• Quickly ensure that the Look in: pull-down menu is set to whatever network drives you want to scrub
• Now Click on the Search button to search for all Thumbs.db files on your system
• In the All or part of the file name box type in Thumbs.db
• After the Search completes, click on the word Edit contained in your top tool bar area
  This will pull down a menu for you to now click on Select All
• Now Press the Delete key on your keyboard to delete all the Thumbs.db files on your system
• Then Close the Search Results window to return back to your Windows session




For those of you who are scared to delete system files, the Thumbs.db and .DS_Store files are strictly cosmetic on network volumes and will have almost no impact on pretty much anything! Do you use them for something? Let us know in the comments.

_TheOCAdmiN_

Create Useful Shortcuts With Tooler. (Windows Download)

Have you ever wanted to create a shortcut on your desktop to disable your screensaver or eject your cd-rom?

You have seen it done and now you have some use for it?

Don't fret young Admin! No need to muss and fuss here is a light weight program that needs no installation: Tooler.

It's only 50kb and will add blanking the monitor, disabling the keyboard, setting the volume to your arsenal of quick access shortcuts.

You can read the picture yourself!

Best of all after you use it to create the shortcuts you are going to want you can throw them on a usb stick and never need the app again! A program that made itself obsolete almost immediately :). Here is the authors website and the direct link to Tooler. Now if only it could create a shortcut to make me rich...

_TheShortcutingAdmiN_

Can I hide the Sceduled Tasks and Printers Folders in the Network view?

By default your windows XP machine shows the Printers and Faxes share along with the Scheduled Tasks folder. You can make use of the scheduled tasks folder like this or use a remote printer share to quickly install a remote printer.

Some people like this, most people don't use it and a few people REALLY hate it. So here is a quick how-to on peacing it out:

To hide the Scheduled Tasks from the network share view, follow these steps:

• Click Start, Run and type REGEDIT
• Navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \RemoteComputer \ NameSpace

• Backup the key by exporting it to a .REG file. (You need this to revert back!)
  
• To remove Scheduled Tasks, delete the following key:

{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

• To remove the Printers folder, delete the following key:

{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}

• Close Registry Editor.

By deleting one key or the other you are removing the folders from the network view and not disabling printing/scheduling in any which way. To restore the shares after removing them import the .REG file you saved in the third step above.

_ThePeaceYouOutAdmiN_

How can you monitor the overall status and health of your network?

So you've just finished rolling out 500 new desktops using disk imaging, and you're keeping them updated using WSUS. How are you going to monitor the overall status and health of your network?


There is a wealth of excellent network monitoring software available, both commercial and open source. One problem with many of them is that they are really geared towards the very large network. Monitoring 1000 servers, 300 switches, 100 routers and 15 firewalls on 3 continents is very different from monitoring 10 servers, 2 switches, 1 router and 1 firewall in a single office. Commercial monitoring software is probably going to be prohibitively expensive for a small network.

JFFNMS (Just For Fun Network Management System) is an excellent open source network monitoring package you can run on any spare Windows or Linux server. Don't let the name fool you, it is a full-featured piece of software which includes autodiscovery, fully configurable alerts, performance graphing, reporting and network mapping.

Installation and configuration is pretty typical for an open source project (meaning a bit more complex than a typical Windows installer package) but I'm sure any experienced administrator can handle it. You will also need to install and configure SNMP on any machine you want to monitor. (Full disclosure and shameless plug: I wrote the new version of the Windows installation instructions.)

After installation, the rest of the configuration is done from a remote browser interface. You add your individual machines and interfaces to the monitoring system and set what parameter changes you want to be notified about. You can monitor pretty much any part of the system that can be queried by SNMP, such as free disk space, network utilization, processor usage, reachability, or if a specific application is running. You can then be alerted when a specific threshold is met or event occurs. You can create pretty graphs to better show trends and create reports of system uptime and availability.

Even in a small network a good NMS allows the administrator to keep on top of the network and be alerted to any potential problems before they result in downtime. It's much better to receive an email telling you the mail server is running out of disk space than to start getting angry calls from users complaining the mail server is down.

Try a working demo.

Download JFFNMS.

How to recover from a HD crash for free.

I Did something pretty cool the other day that I think AtA readers will appreciate.

I Had a hard drive die on a guy in the accounting department. Lets just say he does payroll for the company and I still want to get paid!

Cyclical redundancy check failed was the message. BSD on boot, all that jazz.

Yikes....

Used my Winternals recovery disc and tried to run a chkdsk on it to fix it. No joy.

Mounted the drive in an identical PC that was working and I found a tool online: http://www.partition-recovery.com/download.htm

Used it to gain access to the partition and it has a utility to create a RAW image of the disc. Sucked up 36GB of NAS space, but c'est la vie.

Now WTF am I to do with a RAW drive image??? I figured I could ghost it elsewhere and hope to god the bad sectors do not kill the ghost.

Then I found this: http://liveview.sourceforge.net/

This tool took the RAW disc image and converted it(with the use of VMWare's VMount utility and Java to a bootable VMWare Virtual Machine. You can use their player or server product which is free to d/l to do so.

Booted the machine and installed the right tools and a network card into the VM...bang. PC was back and running in its previous state with some minor corruption of some stuff under the start menu, but pretty much all the data was there!

Made a backup of the data and pushed it to the network, booted the other machine that will replace this girl's box and restored all the data back where it belonged....voila!

Pretty nifty little way around a hard drive crash.

Now I realize all data should be stored on the network, with back up tapes/etc. But this is the way that management wants her to work...so, it is how we have to do it. The machine in question was a P4 IBM desktop running 2000 Pro with NTFS drive.

Hope this is something you guys can add to your toolkits. Do you have another method to solve this madness? Leave it in the comments.

What the Heck is Filling Up My Server?

It's an Admin's worst nightmare (well one of them).

A server's system disk is quickly running out of space for no apparent reason. You know that when the system drive fills the server is going to shut down and you're going to have a lot of unhappy users. You need to find out what is taking up so much space.

There are several tools for looking around your drive and getting a visual image of what is on it. Tools like WinDirStat, Folder Size and TreeSize all do a nice job of showing you where all that space is going.


But sometimes you need a quick and dirty tool and (if you're like me) you don't want to install something on your servers unless you really need to.

That's one great thing about SequoiaView, it gives you a nice visual map of any drive or folder without installing anything. Download the zipped version, unzip it and run the executable. There's nothing to install or risk messing up your servers with. Delete the whole folder when you are done and there's no trace of it.

Of course, I am using JFFNMS to monitor my network so I was able to learn about this impending disaster early enough to do something about it. In my case - I had forgotten to reconfigure the IIS logging on my Exchange server, so the OWA logs were slowly filling up the system drive since they default to Windows\System32\LogFiles.

What do you use to monitor disk space on your servers? Do you have any horror stories to share with AtA? Well that is what the comments are for!

Recover your Windows Account Passwords!

Great open-source utility to recover lost Windows account passwords or to break into a locked machine.

In some cases, you can use special tools that reset your forgotten password (which I'll write about in my up-coming posts..). but there are cases, where you don't want to risk harming the system even more, or where you must know the original password- especially if your NTFS file-system is encrypted using EFS. Another case could be where you have a local-profile of a user and you want to be able to log in to it to recover specific settings of the user.

For all those cases you can use this tool called: ophcrack

these are actually a bunch of tools that can be installed on Linux, Windows & Mac. but I want to focus on the Live CD version of the application. the ophcrack team has compiled a complete all-in-one Linux boot CD that automatically loads the tool and starts the cracking process.

- No installation necessary

- No admin password necessary

- All you need is the ability to boot from a CD !

It can crack passwords from a local or remote SAM file of Windows 2000/XP and even Vista!

Use it for troubleshooting and testing purposes only! ;-)

YaronM

Happy Mother's Day Everyone!

Can you open a command prompt during a Windows install?

I don't know how useful this actually is but I thought I would share it with you guys anyway.

You seem to like useless information... Right??

This trick threw me for a loop. I was watching a junior admin install Windows Vista from a CD and he turned to me smirked and said

"Want to see something cool?"

I shrugged my shoulders and he hit a key combination and brought up a command prompt over the gui that was installing Vista....

I said "Whaaaaat?"

We went back and forth like that for a little bit until I asked him what he uses it for. He shrugged his shoulders this time and he didn't know but he likes that it makes him look cool.

You can open a game of Pinball or Solitaire during an install. Sound appealing to anyone? That's what I call multi-tasking :) So Shift + F10 will get you to the command prompt during an install like the shot below. It works on XP as well.


It only works from the GUI portion and not the white text on blue background parts. I googled it and saw some speculation on using it to inject drivers or folders during your install. But isn't that what Nlite is for?? :) Microsoft themselves said the following:

In some cases, it may be helpful to have access to a command prompt during GUI-mode Setup for the purposes of troubleshooting, copying drivers, starting and stopping services, starting tools such as Task Manager, or other for other needs.To gain access to a command prompt during GUI-mode Setup, press SHIFT+F10.

Do you use this? Did you know about this? Why didn't you tell me? Sheeeesh!

_TheLearnsSomethingNewEverydayAdmiN_

Vista Tip: Can I copy a file or folders path instead of the file itself?

Have you ever brought up a Open dialog and thought to yourself...

Why can't I copy the path of a file/folder directly from explorer?

The Microsoft boys must have heard ya because here it is on your context menu!

It doesn't work in XP but… now it is an option, in Windows Vista.

What you need to do is hold down the shift key, while right-clicking the file or folder...

Choose the Copy as Path from the menu. Here is whats on the clipboard after clicking copy as path:

"C:\Users\Public\Pictures\Sample Pictures\Creek.jpg"

Note: This will also allow you to copy the path of a folder to the clipboard. This becomes VERY handy in grabbing a long path and definitely can save you a few clicks.

Anyone have a way to add this functionality to XP?


_TheWhatYouTalkingAboutWillisAdmiN_

Ubuntu Quick Tip: Missing Minimize and Maximize Window Buttons?

Hello out there in admin land!

It is I, El Di Pablo here to bring you a quick Ubuntu tip for the week. I haven't written on aTa in a while due to my hectic schedule, but I am sure you have seen me milling about the comments quite a bit.

Anyhoo, so there I am last night, screwing around on my Ubuntu laptop surfing porn doing homework when I noticed that all of my minimize and maximize buttons were missing from my windows. The only way to minimize and maximize my windows were to right click on the bottom task bar and select it from the menu. WTF?!?!?

Well, it turns out that those buttons aren't completely controlled by Gnome. For those buttons, Gnome uses a windows manager call Metacity. To get those buttons back I had to open a terminal and run the following command:

metacity --replace

Once I did that, my buttons came back, and I was able to minimize and maximize like a mofo! Do you have any good Ubuntu tips/tricks you want to share? Hit us up in the comments!

By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power