Eddie's Blog

Remote Desktop Connection fails with Nvidia video driver

see http://computingondemand.com/?p=1141 for the fix.

Remote Connection Management Tools

Royal TS: supports RDP only; version 1.5.1 and earlier are freeware.
mRemote: supports RDP, VNC, ICA, SSH, Telnet, HTTP/S, Rlogin, RAW; version 1.50 is a freeware; merged with visionapp Remote Desktop (not free).
Multi Remote Desktop Client .NET: supports RDP.
Terminals: supports RDP

PowerShell working with paths that contain wildcards - square brackets

Use the –LiteralPath parameter available to suppress all pattern matching behavior. But Rename-Item cmdlet does not have the –LiteralPath parameter. A workaround is to use Move-Item cmdlet to rename files.

See Windows PowerShell in Action, page 309 – 312, and http://sandbox.manning.com/thread.jspa?messageID=62599

Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7 manages only Windows Server 2008/2008 R2

Some roles and features on Windows Server 2003 can be managed remotely by using Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7, but not all tools will work against Windows Server 2003, and even if the tool works, there might be specific functions that will not function. Therefore, in order to manage a Windows Server 2003 network, use either a Windows XP-based workstation, or use RDP to connect to the remote servers and manage them directly.

Source: http://www.petri.co.il/remote-server-administration-tools-for-windows-7.htm

Microsoft File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT)

Microsoft will soon offer the new File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) for this purpose, and as of October 2009, it’s already available as a Release Candidate at connect.microsoft.com. The tool isn’t a planning tool—those would typically let you say how many users, shares, and so on you need to support and then generate a server specification. This tool runs on your file server and stresses it with emulated workloads, then tells you what capacity the file server can support in terms of maximum users, throughput, and response time, and tells you where the bottlenecks are. FSCT is a command line utility without a GUI, so it’s very much targeted at IT professionals and solution providers.

To use the tool, you need the server that’s being tested, a client computer, and a computer acting as the controller. Ideally, you want many client computers, to ensure you’re really taxing the server—Microsoft has performed testing with up to 120 clients. You also need an extra network that’s used between the clients and the controller computer to coordinate all the file server requests. Because you need this extra network, each client requires two NICs, one connected to the normal network to make requests to the server and the other connected to the controller network. The controller traffic uses ports 5000 and 5001.

FSCT uses “scenarios” for testing. Scenarios are sets of actions that each client will perform. They’re defined in XML files and implemented via a DLL. Microsoft provides a single scenario with FSCT, but vendors can create new ones for their products.

You need to install FSCT on all machines that are part of the test, including the server, controller, and clients. The FSCT download includes detailed documentation that provides the commands that need to be run on the controller, server, and clients. The commands follow this structure:

Run the FSCT prepare server command on the server with the required parameters, which include the clients, password, simulated number of users, and the scenario.
Run the FSCT prepare controller command on the controller.
Run the FSCT prepare client command on the clients.
Run the FSCT run client command on the clients.
Run the FSCT run controller command on the controller.

Once all tests have run we run the FSCT cleanup command on the server, controller and clients.

A text file is created once the testing is completed that you can examine to get the output of the capacity test. The file shows when the server became overloaded and other performance metrics. The test also creates a more detailed XML report, and you can import and manipulate the XML report with other tools.

To summarize, FSCT is a great tool, but it requires a significant amount of infrastructure and planning to get running. It allows you to get very good information about the capabilities of a file server. The network card requirements may seem like a hindrance, but if you virtualize the clients and the coordinator, it’s really not a big deal to create two virtual network interfaces and a local network at the virtualization layer for the coordinator traffic.

Source: http://enews.penton.com/enews/windowsitpro/tipstricksupdate_/2009_11_09_110909/display

Windows 32-bit and 64-bit share the same activation key

A Windows license key can activate the 32-bit or 64-bit version.

Create a bootable ISO file on a USB flash drive

While searching a free tool to create a Windows 7 bootable ISO file on a USB flash drive, I find the following applications:

Microsoft Windows 7 USB / DVD Download Tool: creates a bootable Windows 7 installation USB flash drive; supports Windows 7 ISO file only.
Novicorp WinToFlash: creates a bootable Windows installation or live USB flash drive; supports Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, and Windows 7 installation CD or DVD, and live CD or DVD (WinPE or BartPE).
UNetbootin: creates a bootable live USB flash drive; supports a variety of Linux distributions.
BootMyISO: creates a bootable ISO file on a USB flash drive; supports some bootable ISO files. If the OS loads and uses its own drivers to access the controller, the emulated CD is no longer accessible, then the OS would not fully boot. This probably can not be used to create the installation or live USB flash drive.
UltraISO: (not free) creates a bootable ISO file on a USB flash drive; supports Windows Vista or Windows 7 installation ISO, HP SmartStart CD and Hiren’s Boot CD. In my test, this is the easiest way to create a bootable ISO file on a USB flash drive (open an ISO file, Bootable, Write disk image). Some ISO files (e.g. ERD 5.0 for XP) gets boot error.

Conclusions:

Unlike burn an ISO to CD or DVD, there is not an easy and reliable way to create an ISO file on a USB flash drive.
Even a good boot USB flash drive does not work all computers which support USB boot option. In my test, Kingston DataTraveller 1 GB USB flash drive boots on a Compaq nc4010 and an HP Pavillion a300y desktop, but does not boot on a Dell Inspiron 1150 and Latitude D610 laptop.

Resources: