Javier's SBS Wonderland : Tools

Internet Explorer Keywords for DNS Troubleshooting

Javier — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 17:01:00 GMT

I think its safe to say that DNS is part of the fabric of the internet. I don't remember how many times I had (or helped someone with) issues with public DNS, but I can assure you that it has been a lot. DNS controls everything about your domain, from the correct resolution of your website to where your email should go.

My two favorite sites for troubleshooting public DNS issues are www.dnsreport.com and www.dnsstuff.com. These two sites have saved me in numerous occassions and whenever somebody is having some DNS issue they are my first stop to help determine the problem. I encourage you to familiarize yourself with each site... I can assure you that you will find them as useful as me. Did I mentioned that both sites are free? :-)

Ok. So, those sites are old news for you? Well... I have something here that you might like. I “borrowed” an idea from Susan's blog and created a registry file that adds a set of keywords to the IE address bar so you can use this site even faster.

Right click here, select “Save As” and save it to your desktop renaming the extension to .reg (alternatively you can just click the link to see what we are adding to the registry). Double click on the file and allow it to be imported into the registry. That's it! You can now open IE and use the following keywords to do amazing stuff...

DNS somedomain.com - Generates a DNSReport for that domain

A something.somedomain.com - A record for that hostname

MX somedomain.com - MX record(s) for that domain

PTR x.x.x.x or something.somedomain.com - Reverse DNS records for that IP/Hostname

WHOIS somedomain.com - Registration information about a domain

So, do you think this is useful? Comment below and let me know what you think!

LimitLogin - Tool to limit and monitor concurrent logins in a domain

Javier — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 23:54:00 GMT

A couple of people in the past have asked how to prevent users from logging more than 1 time (or x number of times) on different devices across the network. I stumbled accross this tool which seems like it does exactly that better than the old CConnect.exe (also some other nice features):

LimitLogin v1.0

LimitLogin is an application that adds the ability to limit concurrent user logins in an Active Directory domain. It can also keep track of all logins information in Active Directory domains.

LimitLogin capabilities include:

· Limiting the number of logins per user from any machine in the domain, including Terminal Server sessions.

· Displaying the logins information of any user in the domain according to a specific criterion (e.g. all the logged-on sessions to a specific client machine or Domain Controller, or all the machines a certain user is currently logged on to).

· Easy management and configuration by integrating to the Active Directory MMC snap-ins.

· Ability to delete and log off user session remotely straight from the Active Directory Users and Computers MMC snap-in.

· Generating Login information reports in CSV (Excel) and XML formats.

LimitLogin grants System Administrators, Help Desk staff or any other IT-related personnel the ability to quickly query for any user logged on to the domain and view the machines they’re currently logged on to, while enabling the above list of features and management tasks to be performed on those user sessions.

Note: As far as I can tell this only works with Win2k3 domains and the clients must be running Win2k or XP. You can download the tool here.

Windows XP Partner Pack

Javier — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 05:44:00 GMT

This might be old news for some... but I just learned about this. Microsoft has a “partner pack” for XP which consist on 3rd party tools like:

Google Deskbar
CA's eTrust (free for 1 year)
Microsoft TimeZone (I recommend this)
Much more

Although I wouldn't install all those apps on my PCs... I think some of them have great potential. You can check out the Partner Pack here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/partnerpack/

By the way, another set of very useful tools for XP are PowerToys (I realize these are much more common tools). Personally, I really like TweakUI, Image Resizer and Open CMD here.