quick Windows 7 tip
Found a quick workaround for my complaint that you can’t pin items that are on network shares to the Windows 7 taskbar. All you have to do is create a folder for shortcuts to all the items, create a new toolbar on the taskbar using that folder. It shows up like the old Quicklaunch toolbar, and creates a separate icon on the taskbar when the app is launched, but it kinda solves my problem.
Here’s the steps:
- Create a new folder with shortcuts to the applications you can’t pin.
- Right click taskbar and unlock it.
- Right click the taskbar again, select toolbars, then select “New toolbar.”
- Browse to the folder you created, and click “select folder."
One line administration – search and delete computer accounts
Here’s a quick one-line script I’ve been using to clean up some old computer accounts in active directory. It requires the dsquery and dsrm tools from the Server 2003 Admin Pack or the Remote Server Administration Toolkit.
@for /f %%a in ('DSQUERY COMPUTER -NAME *%1') do (dsrm %%a)
Save that in as a batch file and it’ll query Active Directory for computers including the argument passed. Here’s an example with a naming structure where we have the last 4 digits of the MAC address in the name for uniqueness.
C:\>adrm.cmd 6736
C:\>(dsrm "CN=LABPC6736,OU=Labs,DC=yakk0,DC=org" )
Are you sure you wish to delete CN=LABPC6736,OU=Labs,DC=yakk0,DC=org (Y/N)? y
dsrm succeeded:CN=LABPC6736,OU=Labs,DC=yakk0,DC=org
Fun with icacls
We've been having some random problems at work with various software packages and have tracked it down to folder redirection policies and permissions. It appears that years ago people couldn't get folder redirection working right and rigged it up with some registry hacks and scripts. It works fine in 2000, which most of our users use, but breaks in Vista because Vista doesn't like to redirect to a drive letter. In particular we were noticing the Application Data was partially on the network share and partially on the local drive. The other thing we've noticed is the permissions on the folders aren't set properly. Following Microsoft's recommended settings for permissions and redirection policy, we tested and sure enough things started working.
Fun with virtualization
Part one of my home computing infrastructre is done. I am moving from the free VMWare Server to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (thanks to my Technet subscription). VMWare Server is nice, but a little slow. Hyper-V is something I've wanted to play with for a while, but I was also considering VMWare ESXi, which is a free version of their enterprise ESX server. I settled on Hyper-V moved everything off my server onto my Drobo.
Increasing max capacity on Drobo (or how my network learned to hate me)
My wonderful wife got me a 1.5TB drive for my Drobo for Christmas. Currently the little storage robot has 3 500GB drives configured for a max capacity of 4TB. When I got the device, I thought that it'd be longer until the larger drives came down in price and figured it'd be enough. Boy, was I wrong. that 1.5TB drive was around $100 when we got it. The 500GB drives were around the same price in June when I got the drobo. Hard drive prices are plummeting, so I figured that I'd reconfigure the Drobo for the current max of 16TB now while I had the chance. It'll be a long time before I can fill that up...right?