Windows Server How ToYour Windows Server Knowledge Base

Windows server 2003 has very nice tool “forfiles.exe” which provides you with quick and nice file search function.

If you want to use it with your Windows XP machine download it from here .

This tool can be played with mass of functions and in this article i`ll show how to use it with some of them.

For example i want to search through all *.log files in C:\Windows folder and subfolders.

If i find any *.log file there that size is greater than 1MB i want to export  path, size and modify time information of that file into C:\Data\LogFileInfo.txt .

In that case open command line and type:

forfiles.exe /p C:\Windows /s /m *.log /c “cmd /c IF @fsize GTR 1000000 (echo @path @fsize @fdate)” >C:\Data\LogFileInfo.txt

Syntax:

/p – what path to search
/m – what file type to search
/s – include subfolders
GTR – greater than

Few weeks ago i got tough situation when share i made offline was moved to another server by local administrator and all users were still trying to synchronize offline files with old server.

How to act in this situation You would ask?

First of all you must download Windows server 2003 Resource Kit Tools from this site .

In this case we will need csccmd.exe tool which will work on Windows XP systems too.

Install tools pack you downloaded, open command line and navigate to Resourse Kit Tools folder.

When you are in place type:

csccmd.exe /moveshare:\\oldserver\oldshare \\newserver\newshare

Press “Enter” and you are done !

I hate this one really…

Then path to file exceeds 255 symbols it becames corrupted and you can have very hard time to delete or rename it.

Ok, how to deal with this.

At this case you have three choices:

1. Dont use too long paths! Use short names for you folders and avoid naming folders this way:

“Very important documents for financial department that were copied from local storage at 20080607″

2. If you did already,  you can try to follow path to file and try to rename some very long folder names to shorter one.

3. You can use third party software that will run on your Windows server 2003, Windows XP and even older machines to deal with these files.

One of really great and free utils is “DelinvFile”.

You can download it from here .

This post will show you how to install Active Directory schema configuration snap in for your Microsoft management console. For that you have two ways.

1. Install Windows server 2003 support tools package (supptools.msi) . It is located inyour OS CD  Support\Tools directory.

ADSI Edit will be automatically installed and registered by doing that.

2. If you want to install only ADSI Edit tool copy adsiedit.dll file from support tools into %systemroot% directory (default C:\Windows) .

Then click Start>Run and type regsvr32 adsiedit.dll

Press “OK”

This quick post will show you how to delete files that are being used by system or running processes.

When you try to delete that kind of files on your Windows machine  you get error:

“Access denied”

or

“File/Folder is being used by applications. Please close the application and then try again”

To delete these “corrupted” files you can use  tool named “Unlocker”. It removes lock from file or folder and you can delete it afterwards.

You can download this tool from here .

Cheers!

If you are looking for quick way to get information about remote system this how to is for you. I present you network scan tool – Winfingerprint. This tool is designed to gather information about Microsoft systems and applications. It can use RPC, ICMP, SMB, SNMP, TCP and UDP to obtain various information. You can quickly get information about remote OS version, users, groups, SID, password policies, services, shares, disks and much more.

You can read more about this tool here .

Tool can be downloaded from this location .

This post will show you how to run Network Diagnostics scan to test your network connectivity and troubleshoot related issues. I personally run this tool first thing every time i troubleshoot network related issues on client system. To run scan open command line on your Windows XP and type:

netsh diag gui

In “Network Diagnostics” windows select “Set scanning options” to set or unset various scanning objects that will be tested during scan.

To start scan press “Scan your system” button.

This post will show you how to get control of remote command line using psexec . Psexec is part of “pstools” written by Mark Russinovich and can be downloaded here . Lets say we want to connect to server named “testserver” and get control of its command line. To do it open command line on your Windows server 2003 and type:

psexec \\testserver cmd

This post will show you how to troubleshoot various errors of Windows server and other products. Microsoft provides you with command line tool which will guide you through errors and will help to understand their meanings.

This tool is named err.exe and can be downloaded from here .

Enjoy

This how to will provide you with link to download Microsoft advanced calculator. It is equiped with advanced mathematical and conversion functions.

Tool can be downloaded from this site .

At last tool that is really working! I have tested many tools to clone Windows servers to new hardware but all my attempts were unsuccessfull. BSOD was my constant escort. Few weeks ago i found “Acronis Excho server” with Universal restore function. It worked! I have already cloned 4 servers from old harware to new one with no problems. Latest cloning was old Intel SWV25 model to Sun Fire x2100 M2. All raid configurations are being configured during cloning process in easy understandable GUI. No more BSOD. Try it!

You can read more about this great tool here .

This article will show you how to create log file of memory resources consuming on your Windows server 2003. To create log and place it to D:\Logs directory open command line on your Windows server 2003 and type:

memsnap /m D:\Logs\memoryusage.log

Created log will be in “raw” format and in order to read it is recommended generate log analysis file. To generate it type:

memsnap /a D:\Logs\memoryusage.log

Note that memsnap is part of Windows server 2003 support tools. They can be found on your OS CD (Support\Tools directory).