Windows Home Server, Painless Backups for all!

So my Freenas NAS has been a pain in the ass lately.  It has this neat little habit of forgetting it has hard drives attached to it.  This is the second time this has happened, so I decided to branch out and try new server OS’s.  I have read a little bit about Windows Home server and heard the claims that “It just works”.  With this in mind, I decided to give it a chance.  The install was neat to say the least.  At first it installed windows 2003 server, then converted it to SBS and finally logo-ed it as WHS.  This process took 5 reboots, and looked like one hell of a batch file by MS.  The one thing I didn’t like was that it didn’t ask for an admin password until it was finished installing.  I was away form the house during the end of the install process and couldn’t log in to RDP on the server until I had an admin password set. That aside the install was pretty painless.

Setting up the WHS client on the rest of the PCs was equally as painless.  Once installed from either a CD or the handy dandy network share under \\server\software I could remotely manage all the WHS functions and as well have remote access to my PCs (through a activex based RDP client).  This client also facilitates automated network backups, but I was going to set this up later…  or so I thought!

Since the old NAS used UFS for a file system, I have to use UFS explorer to mount the disk in windows and copy the data to the WHS.  This is taking some time so I opted to leave my PC on overnight to finish copying.  When I got up this morning I checked the status of the drives to see how much data has been copied.  WHS has this neat little graph which displays different chunks for data, system, backups and so on.  What did I see but a blue chunk full of 26gigs of backup.  I never even touched the setups and WHS took care of my backups over night.  How cool is that!  Now that’s what I call painless backups!  I recommend it for anyone that is looking for a nas solution.

Windows Home Server Host Headers

Recently my FreeNas file server has been giving me some problems.  So I decided to try out that copy of Windows home server I had lying around.  In my never ending consolidation of servers I also decided to move my other blog to WHS.  As you can see b the link I am using a host header to forward my one static IP to the right website on IIS.  This setup worked fine until I wanted to access my WHS from the same adamchurchill.ca domain.  When I set a host header for my WHS it wouldn’t forward.  From what I can gather from forums it seems to have  something to do with SSL.  So here’s where I cheated to get it work. I set up my new header on my dns provider (zoneedit.com) and left the host header on WHS blank.  Where I had all my other headers set (www, blog, etc) I could let WHS become the default domain.  Seems to be working so far!

So there are limits to Outlook storage

So I never thought I would see this one.  Tried to delete an e-mail this morning in outlook 2003 and I got this message.  So I checked my deleted folders and lone behold there is a limit to the amount of items you can have in a single folder in Outlook 2003.  I knew of the limitation, but never thought I would reach it.  Crazy

Oh, if you are wondering the limitation is 65,535 items

Add a sidebar to windows without extra software

Today’s post is another organization tip, this one for your desktop.  I have tired a lot of desktop management software / toolbars and I always have issues with the amount of resources that they use.  Many desktop customization apps have a sidebar or quickbar application launcher that lives on either the left or right side of your screen, which is really what I was looking for.  So today I will show you how to create this nativly in Windows.

1) Add a folder to c: called shortcuts
2) Right click on your taskbar and click on “Toolbars” –> “Add New Toolbars”
3) Browse to your shortcut folder on C and press ok.  This will create a shortcuts toolbar on your taskbar.
4) Drag the “shortcuts” toolbar off of the taskbar and drag it to the far side of your monitor.  This should automatically mount the toolbar.

This is the basic toolbar setup.  I tweaked it to my liking by adding auto-hide, always on top and large icons (these options are avaiable by right clicking on the toolbar and all the options are avaliable).  You can add as many shortcuts and folders as you would like to the toolbar by adding such contenc to the c:\shortcuts folder on your computer.

Mount your ISOs without rebooting using Magic Disc

I hate carrying around CDs at dealerships I support.  Its cumbersome and I always end up leaving CDs in the drives, never to be found again.  Its also a pain when the CD you didnt think you needed, but now do is in another binder.  As a solution I first tried copying the contents of CDs to network shares, but later found some discs that work better as CDs.  So my next solution would be making an image and mounting it to a virtual CD drive.

Now just about every system admin has mounted at least 1 ISO to in their lifetime, be it Windows, Office or the latest pirated game they just downloaded.  There are many available software packages out there that do a great job of mounting ISOs from built in shell extensions to full out burning suites which include an ISO mounting add-in.  So what makes Magic Disc so special?  The ability to install and mount an ISO without having to reboot.  This was the decision making factor  for my choice in mounting software.  As an added bonus the install is pretty minimal, so I just leave it on the root of the ISO network share that is in each branch.

So throw your old scrateched up CDs back in their binder and give Magic Disc a try.  Oh and did I mention its FREEWARE ?

http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm

Outlook Organization Tip

Ever set a reminder flag on your outlook and then through the flood of e-mails, have that flag slowly make its way down to the bottom of the inbox, never to be remembered again? This has been an issue with me for a while. So when I got another repeat e-mail requesting some function access to our server, I sat down and really started looking at my Inbox. To my surprise, there is quite the easy solution to this problem

Order by Flag

This is more stupidity on my part, but I figured I’d post this in case anyone else out there may have overlooked this Outlook must! And dont worry about not keeping up on your latest e-mails, it still orders the incoming e-mails by date, but just below your flagged e-mails, which really should be on top anyways

Automated inventory care of SIW

Due to a recent change in software, I needed to upgrade RAM in all of the older machines in the organization.  To aid me in upgrading 300+ PCs I thought it prudent to make a list of what hardware each PC had.  I have used many inventory tools in the past (the most prominent being SpiceWorks) but by far the best inventory tool I have used is SIW.  This software comes in both free and paid versions, the paid having more features.  The feature that caught my eye for the paid version was the ability to use command line to control SIW.  After reading through the documentation, I made this small script that will e-mail the results of the scan to a inventory e-mail address.

@ECHO OFF
set INPUT=
set /P INPUT=The owner of this PC is: %=%
CLS
echo Creating and sending %INPUT%’s System Report.  Please Waitsiw /log=”%INPUT%” /email=INVENTORY EMAIL ADDRESS/subject=”%INPUT%’s report” /smtp=EMAIL SERVER /silent /nologo
CLS
CLS
ECHO %INPUT%’s Report is sent
Pause

This script allows the user to input their name, which in turn becomes the name of HTML file containing system specs along with the subject of the e-mail.  This batch file also requires the SIW.exe and SIW.lic file along with it to work.  So I threw it all togeather using freeextractor and created an install file.  Keep an eye out on making install files with freeextractor soon!

References:

http://www.gtopala.com/ – SIW
http://freeextractor.sourceforge.net/FreeExtractor/ – FreeExtractor

Clearing out corrupt print jobs REDUX

Quick update to clearing out print jobs.  Got a call this morning from a user who repeatedly gets jobs stuck in their print queue.  To help reduce his calls, I wrote this quick batch and put it on his desktop.

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Repairing Printer… Please wait….
Net stop spooler
del /Q c:\windows\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start spooler
cls
ECHO Please powercycle your printer
ECHO …
ECHO Printer is repaired
pause

Try it out!

Chris Control

Chris Control was the answer to my Prayers when I had a PC that would not connect through RDP.  ChrisControl is an all in one client that uses both RDP and VNC.  The neat thing about ChrisControl is if you know the admin account, it can remotely connect to the PC, install a VNC server and connct to it… No configuration Required!  And to complete the puzzle it also removes VNC from the remote PC when you close the session, making your PC secure once again.  This works great in our environment where not every PC is on the AD, and has the advantage both the tech and user to access the same screen at the same time.

Oh, and did I mention it also does WOL for those PCs who are powered down?

Heres the download link! http://www.chall.plus.com/winpe/

Gotta small HDD? Running out of space? Spacemonger to the Rescue!

Ever have a clien that complains about running out of space on their Hard drive?  Instead of spending all that time going through directories and finding out where the junk is, check out Spacemonger.  This tool will scan hard drives on your PC and display it in a nice graphical fashion.  As you can see in the screenshot, I took a quick scan of the recovery drive on my laptop.

Spacemonger comes in 2 versions, the Paid and free version.  Personally I like the free version better.  Its small and does everything I need it to.  As an added bonus, it dosnt require an install, so I can take it along with me on a USB key or leave it up on the tools shared drive at the dealership.

Heres the Product link http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

You may have to do some digging around for the download link.  Its on the download page, under free software at the bottom of the list.