September 2006 - Posts

How to Determine What Domain Controller Authenticated the User

A frequent question on the newsgroups is how do I know what domain controller logged me in? To find this out, open a command prompt and type "set logonserver". echo %logonserver% has the same functionality. This is an environment variable so...
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How to Capture an Image from the Ghost Console

Note that you'll need to have a Sysprep answer file created and the associated binaries. This post covers how to do that. You should also have the Ghost Client installed on the image source machine. To do this use the Tools>Remote Client Install menu...
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How to Build a Sysprep Answer File for Imaging

Sysprep is one of those things that seems to have a certain mystique that surrounds it. People either don't run it because they don't understand it, or perhaps because they don't know how. Some people also just don't think it's necessary...
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Word 2007 Does Blogging Apparently

I just accidently stumbled upon blogging support in Word 2007. I IM'ed Susan who told me "Dude where have you been? :)". Apparently I've been lost in outer space or something. The whole Windows Live Writer thing was pretty cool, no more...
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Delegating Enable/Disable Account Rights in Active Directory

I answer this question a lot on the newsgroups - "How do I delegate enabling and disabling Active Directory accounts?". The long and short of it is you can't. More precisely you can't without delegating access to set a whole bunch of...
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Command Prompt History

Another tip for today, the Windows command prompt will actually show you a little history view of all the commands you've typed in the current session. You can use the arrow keys to select a past command and execute it again as well. To access this...
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Active Directory GUI Tools on a Member Server

A useful tip I've found people tend not to know about is that the Active Directory GUI tools (AD Users and Computers, Sites and Services, etc) are installed on every Windows 2000 and 2003 server regardless of whether or not the server is a domain...
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Office 2007 Beta 2 Refresh

The Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh was posted a couple of days ago to the Microsoft download site. It's posted in the form of a patch, so you have to have a pre-existing Office 2007 Beta 2 install. There is a known issues list and some notes...
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New Look for the Site

After a couple hours of customization, I activated a new theme for the BrianDesmond.com site. The old look was the same theme I had when I started a blog on weblogs.asp.net in 2003. I felt like it was kind of depressing to look at the old colors - there...

Sometimes the Windows CLI sucks...

I wanted to remove all the WMAs in my music folder since the DRM stuff has been screwed up for a while - I can just redownload it anyway from Yahoo Music. So, given I've spent alot of time on *nix stuff lately this seemed perfectly valid: D:\Music>dir...
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SecureCRT Script for Mass Changing Cisco Switch/Router Passwords

Attached to this post is a simple script which connects over either Telnet or SSH to a list of devices and resets the enable password, local password for the vty lines, and the console password. The script will login either with a username/password pair...
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Script to Dump Exchange Mailbox Info to Spreadsheet (CSV)

I found another useful script I wrote last year on my hard drive this evening. It's attached at the bottom of this post. This script will dump quite a bit of useful information about each mailbox on a particular server or set of servers to a CSV file...
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