Martin Zugec blog : Other

Use RunAs from non-domain computer?

martin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:32:04 GMT

First I would like to make big announcement - after almost 3 years I left DHL and joined company called Login Consultants... So after long time I am consultant (again) and you can expect more posts about different problems I encountered during my consultancy career...

And I already encountered one during my first day - working with domain-based environment from non-domain computer. As mentioned before, I really love Vista (it took me however some time to get used to it) so I immediately installed it on my new laptop (that is no longer under corporate policies and rules). And then I realized that customer have (well, of course) domain and my non-domain laptop won't be able to do much (except accessing remote shares and running RDP\ICA sessions).

So I started to investigate and came with solution. I found MSDN article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682434(VS.85).aspx and one specific part of the article grabbed my attention:

LOGON_NETCREDENTIALS_ONLY
0x00000002

Log on, but use the specified credentials on the network only. The new process uses the same token as the caller, but the system creates a new logon session within LSA, and the process uses the specified credentials as the default credentials.

This value can be used to create a process that uses a different set of credentials locally than it does remotely. This is useful in inter-domain scenarios where there is no trust relationship.

The system does not validate the specified credentials. Therefore, the process can start, but it may not have access to network resources.

Sounds very interesting - so I started to play with this API and it turned out (to make it very simple) that it acts as token that contains multiple credentials (Logon SIDs):

Notice the Logon SID - there are 2 values

This way you can specify MULTIPLE accounts you want to use. In example below I have 3 different credentials:

Cmd with 3 Logon SIDs

Just be aware, based on my testing each credential should be from different domain, otherwise only FIRST match is used.

I tested this solution today - and it works like charm :) For accessing local PC, I am using my account (MartinNB\Martin), for accessing any domain resources, I am using Domain\Operator account automatically. I tried this with accessing remote shares, MMC console (AD Users and Computers) and also PsExec with implicit authentication (that means no username\password defined).

When I knew what I was looking for, it turned out that my whole research was partially waste of time - this functionality is already included in RunAs itself through /NetOnly parameter :)

To show you example how to use it:

We have company XYZ. They provided account SuperAdmin for me with password SuperPassword.

I will first run command RunAs /NetOnly /User:XYZ\SuperAdmin cmd and specify password SuperPassword when prompt appear. New cmd window will automatically appear.

Now I can simply kill explorer (taskkill /f /im explorer.exe) and run it again (explorer.exe) - my desktop will switch, so from now on I can normally work with XYZ domain AND my non-domain laptop :D

I am just thinking about writing some small utility that would allow you to easily switch between different customers profiles (codename Desperate Consultant)... I wrote to Joe from Joeware if he is willing to add this (NetOnly functionality) to his cool utility CPAU - if he agrees, I will wait for him and build it, otherwise I will create some wrapper around RunAs.

Idea is that you will predefine any credentials and that easily merge that credentials into your session.

Didnt your comment appear on blog?

martin — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:39:00 GMT

Heya everyone,

Elevator is much more popular than I expected, and spam likes popular sites ;) Also I probably found bug in Live Writer - when I publish anything, it will try to add whole post as comment.

So I had to enable moderated comments here - no worries, I am publishing all of them and I dont filter\alter anything.

I just wanted to let you know that if your comment is not posted, just hold on ;)

Changing blog name

martin — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:33:00 GMT

Scripting? Sometimes...

Vista? Sometimes...

Deployment? No post for long time...

I was thinking about this for long time and I finally decided to change name of my blog - and because only thing I am sure that won't change (at least I don't expect it) for some time is my name, I am changing blog name to it ;)

Google maps with Wikipedia and Photos

martin — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:12:00 GMT

Yesterday I wrote blog entry about Live Maps and Wikipedia... I really like mesh ups (using existing data sources), so I just wanted to check if this isnt supported also by Google Maps.

Google Maps supports Wikipedia - and result is far better then Live Maps implementation (which feels like beta).

To test it, just go to maps.google.com, search for any location.

Then click on More button (upper-right) and select Wikipedia (and definitely try also Photos).

This is really REALLY nice and I love it :)

Live Maps with integrated Wikipedia results?

martin — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:11:39 GMT

Well, almost ;)

I love Google, but I also love Live :) For me rivalry of Google vs. Live is good thing, because it moves both of them forwards...

Talking about searching web, I still prefer Google - I use Live Search sometimes, but after they removed my favorite functionality (at beginning they were loading new entries when you scrolled to bottom of page automatically, you can still see this behavior when searching for images), I was really disappointed. Live Search is also missing Groups search, which is no. 1 when trying to find answer to some technical problem.

For some searching I prefer Live - best examples are maps (with all collections, drawing, integration with Outlook etc), videos (they include live preview if you hover mouse over thumbnail) or pictures (there are many features I love when searching for pictures - for example collections, which is really handy if you need to gather some pictures etc)...

Today I found feature in Live Maps I was not aware of - Live Search is automatically indexing Wikipedia and displaying articles that contains geographical information...

It is quite easy to use it:

1.) Search for location you want to see. When it is found, click on Explore collections:

2.) From filter, select Wikipedia:

3.) Locations defined in Wikipedia are displayed on map... Hovering above number will provide detailed information about location:

Presentations for download

martin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:54:00 GMT

I am really messy with my presentations - I always forgot to keep copy of powerpoint slides and I found out yesterday that I only have 8-10 ppts available from my own presentations :(

So I decided I will change it - I am creating new SkyDrive public folder and I will try to upload all (future) presentations there...

BTW I really like SkyDrive - free for use, 5GB is enough for me, easy to use and to share...

Today I have presentation about Application Virtualization (comparison of all products, MAV, XenApp, Thinstall, SVS, Xenocode...), so I will try to upload it also

Martin

Google Trends

martin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:11:00 GMT

I am always curious about which articles from my blog are most interesting for people... To my surprise no. 1 (for long time) is post about changing resolution from batch script.

I wanted to find some site or something with "Great list of unanswered technical questions", but so far no luck... Just by accident I run into Google beta project called Google Trends - and I really like it :)

It allows you to search for query trend based on some words. For example if you specify Microsoft, it will show you how often people searched for this term in history together with some News extractions...

You can also compare different search strings. For example specify Microsoft,Google and you will see trends in search queries (notice big google jump in 2005).

I am not sure however how these results are if you try to specify more generic term. For example comparing Windows, Linux, Apple - are also results for "Windows Replacement" included? Or is New York results included for Apple results? ;) If results are accurate, it shows interesting trend, where less and less people are interesting in Linux and interest in Apple is growing (with Windows falling slowly).

That is quite hard to say... It you try specific query (as mentioned Microsoft + Google), you probably get good results... Interesting result is comparing Softgrid and Thinstall

Also notice regions (and time span) below - this can be very interesting if countries want to find where are people intersted about their products. For example you can see that most people interested in Citrix are from Oslo, Amsterdam and Sydney

Specify default process priority and CPU affinity for some processes

martin — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 08:20:00 GMT

Well, you already run into similar problem before - you have one process that you want (must) run at background all the time, but it is decreasing responsiveness of your whole system. So you assign it lower priority (Idle\Below Normal), but after reboot\process restart it have same priority again.. And same applies for CPU affinity - you would like to keep one core (we are talking about dual core systems) only for some processes that you want to keep highly responsive - you can do it, but specify it for all processes over and over again??

That is too much pain.

On my system I have 87 processes running - most of them from "enterprise vital" products like Symantec or Altiris (well, now it is same company), these you really love to have many processes (Altiris is running 5 on mine, Symantec 11) and some of them can really destroy your day (Symantec auto update - it will run 3 (!) processes, all of them set to high priority\realtime).

So after little investigation (and writing few scripts) it turns out there is one utility already doing this and it is really nice - name is Process Lasso and you can find it here.

Process Lasso allows you to configure default values for processes - so everytime process with specified name runs, it will have predefined priority and affinity. I am only missing option to build rules not based on process name, but on Company name (Vendor) instead.

As "bonuses" you will get tons of additional features, for example foreground boosting (process that is in front will get priority boost) - I just turned this feature on few seconds ago, so dont have any personal experiences ;)

Also if one process tries to get too much resources, his priority will be lowered - in fact same functionality as ThreadMaster on Citrix\Terminal Services (if you dont know it, download it immediately - it is for free and can same you lot of pain by preventing one user from crashing whole server).

New PC is coming - expect much more blogging activities :)

martin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Heya guys,

I try to keep this blog alive, but I am running in some problems with my home PC - I dont have any :(

What it means is that I must use my official laptop for blogging - and that means no betas, no experiments, only stick with "normal" projects. Today I ordered my shiny new PC, so you can expect much more activity here in new future.

I would love to focus on Citrix AIE pretty soon - I was running some experiments recently and it turns out AIE is VERY good technology and I dont understand (well, I do, but it is due to bad implementation) why most people dont like AIE and dont trust this (really useful) technology a lot. So when my PC will arive, I will install some VMWare(s)\Xen(s)\Virtual Server(s) and run destructive tests to share with you :)

Also I plan to release new version of GroupsOverview utility (with minor fixes\added features). One of new features should be ability to use it with Citrix - in GUI, you just select published icons you are interested in and you will see relationships to Active Directory groups. I consider this utility pretty useful and I use it quite often, how about you, have you tried it?

Also I would like to create new (totally redesigned) version of AutoUpdate script with ability to share configuration - this utility is also quite useful for me, so I would really like to extend it in future. Out of new features, most interesting are ability to write post-download scripts (so you could for example automatically extract archived Sysinternals utilities to some folder), link-based downloads (so even utilities that doesnt have direct download site will work), automatic proxy detection and configuration (which is not possible now and if you have proxy at work you know that it can be pretty painful if you need to switch it on and off and on and off...) and unattended mode with reports (so you can schedule this check to run every hour).

Next project I would like to work on is set of utilities for automating Citrix - tool for automatic generation of published icons, automatic assignment of load evaluators and tool for automatic creation of AIE (and rules if possible), but for this I need some time.

Also COMDetector should be extended - it should use resources in next release, so it should be much more robust and reliable (and without annoying message boxes finally).

Are there any other tools you are missing currently?

Talking about article, I would like to start writing reviews about some products that got my attention recently - mostly SBC related.

Martin

How to detect if library requires registration II.

martin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:08:00 GMT

As you maybe noticed, I released small utility that allows you to detect all libraries (dlls or ocxs) that requires registration using RegSvr32 and can potentially lead to DLL hell (and are very dangerous in SBC environments, specially with strong NTFS security)...

In this utility I am using LoadLibraryA API to load library and then try to detect existance of DLLRegisterServer function. Problem is that this API is too "intelligent" - it is not really silent and sometimes it will popup some message box like "This application has failed to start because xxx.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.". LoadLibrary requires also all dependent libraries to be loaded successfully and that is why such messages are returned.

Because there is nothing I can do about this error and COMDetector is command line tool that should be used for parsing, I decided I must found another way how to detect such files. Another approach was to detect OLESelfRegister. After some investingation I found that this is present as part of the Version information, so I tried to have a look through normal GUI and voila - to my surprise this information is really there :)

So (if you want to do it quickly) easiest way how to detect if DLL\OCX requires registration is to right-click on such file, select Properties, Version and locate OLESelfRegister - if it is there, you must register such component (or generate manifest as I wrote in another article).

Right now I am rewriting COMDetector to implement this new scan technique, I am also adding switch for recursive scanning. If you want to request any additional functionality, just let me know.

Microsoft Scalable Fabric

martin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:19:00 GMT

When I was browsing Microsoft Research projects, I run into one I was not aware of - it is called Microsoft Scalable Fabric (http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/20682d64-c8c0-4427-8157-41a8bae15e13/Details.aspx?0sr=d)

Well, that name doesnt say anything. You can consider it as alternative to standart task bar - and very good (even though badly written) alternative.

Before saying anything else - Fabric is not installing any drivers or replacing any system components, so you can test it freely and then disable\remove it. I strongly recommend to try it and to share your thoughts here afterwards ;)

MS Scalable Fabric is different approach to window management specially focused for large monitors. Idea is quite simple - when you drag your window from central area, it will automatically get smaller and smaller. So you will end up with bunch of small live previews on sides of your monitor - you can group them, minimize\maximize etc.

I must warn you - it is not even alpha version, it is just technology preview or technology test, but it is definitely worthy to try... Hope so we will see this idea one day in future implemented in WDM ;)

How to open dialog for Active Directory search

martin — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:21:00 GMT

Project I am working right now on requires from me to periodically search for something in AD... How to do it (dont expect anything new ;)):

Standart way:

Start -> Run
Hit enter
Type mmc
Hit enter
Click file, select Add\Remove Snap-in
Click Add
Click on Active Directory Users and Computers
Click Close
Click OK
Expand Active Directory Users and Computers
Right-click on domain
Select Find
Type your object name
Click on Find now

My modified way to achieve it was to use following procedure:

Hit Winkey + R
Type dsa.msc
Hit enter
Hit Ctrl+M
Hit End
Hit <that small button opposite winkey that shows context menu>
Hit "i"
Type object name
Hit enter

Nothing really special, hehe :) Just wanted to make you more curious about my final result ;)

So after going through all this again and again, I decided to make some use out of my favourite QLiner - so I mapped following line to one of buttons:

%windir%\system32\rundll32.exe dsquery.dll,OpenQueryWindow

Pretty simple, heh? This command line just shows AD search dialog.

How to control Google using keyboard

martin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:17:00 GMT

Welcome all keyboard maniacs :)

Long time ago I tried Google Keyboard shortcuts - experiment that allows you to navigate through Google results by using only keyboard. I thought it is quite nice, but I havent really tried it...

Today my wireless mouse run out of batteries and after few minutes I got tired of using trackball, so I decided to enable keyboard shortcuts - and I was really surprised that after little time I cant live without it :)

So if you want to test, head to http://www.google.com/experimental/#BetaShortcuts and select Keyboard shorcuts (or you can test any other experiment)...

Controls are quite simple:

J - down
K - up
Enter\O - open
/ - go to search dialog

Martin

Quick access to start menu - and much more!

martin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:34:05 GMT

Real man dont click - and I take it seriously :)

I really prefer to use my keyboard - well, most people that write lot of scripts or are programming prefers the same. There are however some tasks where it is prefered to use mouse - for example start menu. You need to click on start (or hit winkey), navigate to programs, find company, select product, click on correct link...

Well, its not really good. But there is one easy solution for this - it is called Launchy.

This is definition from Launchy`s homepage:
"Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!"

And thats all - you install it, it will index your start menu (plus favorites etc.) and from that moment you can start using it. It is same as start menu indexing you can see in Windows Vista, however does work in Windows XP and it provides you additional features.

Just hit predefined key combination (default Alt+Space is not best, because it is used by system to open window menu (Restore, Minimize etc.), type some text (for example Vis for Visual Studio) and this is what you get:

If it wont automatically show what you want, just hit down key - next time it will remember your selection.

You can also use it for quickly accessing favorites in IE:

You can use it to navigate to different web pages:

You can even use it as calculator :)

Or you can predefine your own shortcuts:

Launchy is really small and simple - but it can completely change the way you access programs on your computer.

Leaving...

martin — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:45:00 GMT

Leaving my laptop, all techie stuff, everything...

..and going to enjoy Christmas holiday :) I am leaving for one week, so everyone Merry Christmas and happy new year! :)

Martin

Working in open space and music aid

martin — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:34:00 GMT

Today my post won`t be about any serious scripting or security issues - I will write little bit about my biggest problem - working in open space.

Working space have many advantages, but also many disadvantages. For companies, it is cheaper to have open space, also productivity is increased... But only in case if you work at helpdesk or have some similar job. But if you are half-developer\architect as me, it is really annoying and instant buzz can get on your nerves.

Therefore if I need to focus on something, I really like to listen to music (my music taste is mixed, but I mostly prefer chillout and indie rock). My problem is that I heard all my mp3s and cds all over and over again.

For some time, I was listening to web radios, however they are not really what I was looking for, instant advertisements were driving me crazy (this is specially case with PowerFM or CapitalFM, they have same ads for almost two years now and they repeat them very often).

After some time I encountered www.last.fm and I can HIGHLY recommend it. Generally, last.FM is music social network - I would compare it to music FaceBook, however last.fm not useless (sorry all FB fans ;)). You can listen to your personalized radios based on your preferences. You can either start by tag or by your favorite artist.

For example right now I am playing "christmas" tag at home. It will automatically play all songs that were tagged by christmas. Usually at my work I listen to chillout tag.

I can (personally) see four major advantages compared to other scenarios (web radios and own music) - you can mark music as loved\baned (which really works), you dont have any ads, you have TONS of songs and you get to know new artists (for example my favorites are now Frou Frou and Sia - never heard of them before).

Even my old xbox (running XBMC) have support for last.fm and that`s all I needed. Right now only feature I am missing is "forgotten bits" (thats my name). What that means?

Quite often it happens that I know only melody\words, but have no clues about artists or track names. This is specially case when I listen to songs on my PDA - I like to have it hidden somewhere and I am too lazy to take it out and have a look on display. So for my favorites songs, only thing I know is melody itself. Not long time ago I was thinking it would be nice idea (from Live or Google) to implement songs search based on voice - you will just hmmm, hmmmmmm bit of song you know and it will find it automatically - and I really found existing (and working) solution :) You can find it at www.midomi.com - just go there, select "Click for signing search" and try to sign part of your song. I tested it myself and even though I am VERY bad singer and I have problem with saying "R", my searching were really working. That way I found that Here comes the sun (song that I really like) is quite old and is from Beatles (I had no idea) :)

So, did you try last.fm and midomi? And do you like it? Share through comments :)

Martin

Copy text from message box

martin — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:53:19 GMT

There is really nice little trick that many people are not aware of - you can easily copy & paste text from message box windows...

You probably know that - your application generated error and you want to send it to vendor\friend\colleague... But how? Usually people just open mail next to error message and retype it, or they take a screenshot either using PrntScrn or some tools (OneNote...)

But have you ever tried simple, but logical approach and hit Ctrl+C? :)

Yes, its working - text from message box is copied to clipboard and you can paste it wherever you want...

For example I run into following error message:

But because I am too lazy and I really hate making typos when retyping numbers and specially error codes, I just selected message box (gave it focus) and hit Ctrl+C. Now if I switch to my Live Writer and hit Ctrl+V, following text will appear:

---------------------------
Message from mzugec 12/9/2007 11:52 PM
---------------------------
Error encountered, instructions 0x8004050f
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

Simple and useful :)

Fighting with proxy - home vs. office

martin — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 09:33:00 GMT

Hmmmm, I am wondering if everyone have same problem as I do - at work, we are using proxy server. Internet Explorer is working fine - it can dynamically enable\disable proxy, same applies for applications that can use IE as proxy configuration source - however there are many applications where you must manually enable\disable proxy.

For example Miranda or Last.FM - and I really hate this :(

One of my friends have very nice idea - what if you could have local proxy (on your laptop) and some scripts that will enable\disable master proxy for this? I like this idea, because you have only one connection to manage and you will point all your applications to this local proxy.

Right now I am looking for best candidate for this - free local proxy, that supports master proxy and have configuration in registry\file or supports some scripting interfaces...

Do you know any such products? Let me know... If I will implement this successfully, I will post step-by-step procedures on this blog.

Martin

DLL hell - is there any solution?

martin — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:43:00 GMT

Hi guys,

long time no post, however I decided it is time to start blogging again...

Right now I run into dll hell problems again :( You don't know DLL hell?

Lucky you ;)

Many years ago we were fighting for each megabyte - talking about HDD (which is really cheap now) and also memory (same applies). That is why Microsoft came with concept of shared libraries.

What it really means? Different applications were able to use shared libraries. If your applications requires msvcrt.dll, they could share one from System32 folder. BUT...

What if your applications requires different version than is currently deployed? Baang - you have problem. What if you have application from one stupid vendor, that overrides default library with old one? It is (or was) really common practice from developers - nothing is important, just to make my application work. I built my application on COM objects (ActiveX, objects that must be registered prior to be used), but I want to be able to run them from CD\USB without installation. Ok, I will just add function that will automatically register them when application is running.

Problem is that COM objects are accessed through registry - you request DLL without knowing exact location, location is retrieved from registry and that's it. Problem is that Last registration wins - if you register library from CD, that you can break other applications that are using same library (Request to registry -> Retrieved location (CD)).

But don't be too pessimistic - with Windows XP, new features arrived that can help us. SideBySide (having different versions of DLLs), .NET (GAC etc and strongly typed libraries) and local and manifest files.

Local and manifest files provides functionality I really love. They allows you to modify application behavior without having access to source codes (in 99,9% cases you don't have access to source code and developers usually don't understand administrator's problems).

If you want to sandbox libraries (normal ones, not COM), just create empty .local file. For example, if affected application is called AppX.exe, create file AppX.exe.local in same folder. This will instruct Windows to search for all libraries at current folder first, even if application is trying to load library using hardcoded path. Even better is when you use AppX.exe.local as folder, not file. In this case just copy all your libraries to this folder.

So consider scenario, where you have application AppX from VendorX. This application is using library LibX.dll, but it requires older version. You will run into problem, you trace problem you LibX.dll and contact vendor - most of the time answer will be "replace LibX.dll in System32 with this file and it will work", which is not something we want to hear. So we just create AppX.exe.local folder next to AppX.exe and copy old version of LibX.dll to this folder and problem is fixed :)

This solves problems with normal libraries, however what to do with COM objects (and they are usually problematic ones)? There is also one solution - create manifest file for your application.

When you query registry, bunch of information is retrieved. Probably most important is InProcServer32 that defines location of library. Using manifest file, you can skip\ignore registry query and provide directly information you want to use.

Following example was taken from great article Escape DLL hell.

Your application is called RegFreeComDemo1.exe and requires COM library VB6Hello.dll. Just create file RegFreeComDemo1.exe.manifest and paste following to this file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<assemblyIdentity name="RegFreeComDemo1.exe" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" />
<file name="VB6Hello.dll" asmv2:size="20480">
    <hash xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2">
      <dsig:Transforms>
        <dsig:Transform Algorithm="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:HashTransforms.Identity" />
      </dsig:Transforms>
      <dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" />
      <dsig:DigestValue>jdNWRZtiPPgwxdkjQt8zBQyVsAE=</dsig:DigestValue>
    </hash>
    <typelib tlbid="{ea995c49-e5d0-4f1f-8489-31239fc9d9d0}" version="2.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" />
    <comClass clsid="{97b5534f-3b96-40a4-88b8-19a3bf4eeb2e}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{ea995c49-e5d0-4f1f-8489-31239fc9d9d0}" progid="VB6Hello.Class1" />
</file>
</assembly>

Query to registry is automatically skipped and information from .manifest is used instead.

There is however one cave eat - you must know information prior to be able to generate such file. There are few ways how to retrieve them:

Use OleView from Microsoft
Import to registry and manually dump
Create Visual Studio project with same name, import libraries and select them as Isolated

MyProject\Refereces\Add\Browse - load library
Select added item and open Properties
Set Isolated to True
Build solution - manifest file with all required entries is automatically generated

I started to work on utility that will be able to automatically generate manifest file for you, however I am afraid it is not as simple as it looks like :(

If there is some developer out there that is willing to help desperate administrators, please let me know. It would be really nice to have one-click solution to most DLL hell problems ;)

Martin

New SysInternals update

martin — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 11:28:00 GMT

I got one small script called Auto-Update - this script is automatically checking if new updates are available and if they really are available, it will download them.

Today I noticed new tools from Sysinternals (yes, I know they are not new, I just havent run this script last month ;)).

Updated utilities are ZoomIt, Streams, String, PsExec, SigCheck and DiskExt.

I tried to find list of changes, so here they are:

ZoomIt - you can type text while zoomed and you can also create scratch pad by clearing screen.
Streams - Streams now supports printing and deleting streams on volume root directories. There is also new -accepteula switch - hope so it will be included with every single utility :(
String - improving performance by limiting no. of bytes that it is reading
PsExec - Officially this release to PsExec, a utility for running programs on remote systems, corrects a buffer overflow bug caused by long command line arguments. Unofficialy as I found out - it also fixes bug with running PsExec against local computer (PsExec \\%ComputerName% cmd is giving you error regarding user name or password). Finally :) This is quite pain when you got automated processing.
SigCheck - new switches -a and -m (more version data and manifests)
DiskExt - now reports the mappings for volume that have not been mounted by a file system.

Regarding PsExec bug, I found it myself, because I really hated this one - rest was taken from RSS here:
http://blogs.technet.com/sysinternals/rss.xml

Most of you probably know RSS for Mark Russinovich blog (http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/rss.xml), however this is maybe even more important for us ;)