[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] Rule one - know which window you are on - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS "DIVA"
Saturday, August 19, 2006 5:29 PM bradley

Rule one - know which window you are on

Seeing this post reminds me that I was my worst enemy last night.  I had an issue on my beta test box that I had to fix before installing the WSUS 3.0 beta and I was comparing the settings in IIS to my home server.  Well stupid me was RDPing into both boxes and stupidly changed the settings that worked on the home server to the ones that broke things on the beta server.

Yup now I had two broken boxes instead of one.

Yeah that was a blonde moment...so then I had to remote into the Server at the office being EXTREMELY careful not to screw anything up in the REAL server and had to compare the settings and permissions in IIS. Some folks have said that they make the background color of each server a different color so they know exactly which server they are working on.

So if you don't have the luxury of having multiple 'real' servers that you can remote into, build a vpc/vmware version of SBS.. I have one on my laptop (tablet PC with 2 gigs) and it gives you a good machine to compare to.

...just don't click on the wrong window like I did....

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# re: Rule one - know which window you are on

Monday, August 21, 2006 11:34 AM by Bucky

If you're using VPN instead of RWW you can use the Remote Desktops MMC Snap-In from the Windows Server 2003 Administrative Tools. I find it helpful when I’m working on numerous servers to prevent a reoccurrence of the issue you mentioned.

# re: Rule one - know which window you are on

Saturday, August 26, 2006 3:08 PM by Tim Long

I have a great little utility called WhoAmI that updates the wallpaper with the host name, IP address, OS version and service pack level, logged in user name and other stuff. I added it to my domain login script so it automatically runs on every computer in the domain whenever anyone logs in. My script allows the administrator to assign the settings or the user to edit their own settings. Works great and you always know what computer you're connected to. There is a similar utility from SysInternals but I prefer WhoAmI.