EASEUS Disk Copy – sector-by-sector disk/partition clone

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

EASEUS Todo Backup – free backup and restore system, partition and hard disk

http://www.todo-backup.com/

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:

1. 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.
2. Run the FSCT prepare controller command on the controller.
3. Run the FSCT prepare client command on the clients.
4. Run the FSCT run client command on the clients.
5. 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