Photo by shawncampbell

A command-line tool that I have found very useful lately is reg.exe, the command-line registry editor. It is particularly useful to make changes to computers remotely using Admin Arsenal's batch file deployment or remote command.

It has a number of different commands (see them by running reg /?) but the ones I use most are ADD and DELETE. It is available on all current versions of Windows so you don't need to worry about deploying it. It's particularly helpful to make a configuration change to a number of computers at a time without using a GPO and waiting for it to be applied. Recently I needed to enable unsolicited Remote Assist on a bunch of computers and reg.exe came to the rescue.

I created the following batch file:
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services" /v fAllowUnsolicited /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services" /v fAllowUnsolicitedFullControl /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" /v AllowTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server" /v fAllowToGetHelp /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

The using Admin Arsenal's software deployment, I pushed the batch file out to the computers and voilà Remote Assist was enabled.

Next time you need to make registry changes on more than one computer, keep this option in mind.

CNET is reporting that Intel and Microsoft will discuss their working relationship in preparations for Windows 7 roll-out.

Intel has the best of both worlds. They were instrumental in Apple's MacBook Air. The walls that this company erects within its offices to separate its efforts between competing customers is quite an accomplishment.

I'm interested in the engineering work that Intel was involved with as it pertains to Windows 7. I'm interested because Windows 7 has the same hardware requirements as Vista, so on the surface you'd think that little had to be done under the covers.

My hat's off to Intel and Microsoft. Windows 7 is turning out to be a pretty nice OS.

    Photo by Akuppa

An interesting article appeared on TheServerSide.com. Written by Peter Varhol, it discusses the big players in Cloud Computing (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc.) and why their actions could end up restricting choice on the part of developers.

So why would sys admins give a toss about these developments? Simple actually. Changes in development architecture seem to effect the IT professional community faster than other market segments. This is because development and system administration are so intertwined (afterall, it wasn't until 2008 that Microsoft began splitting their TechEd convention by developer vs. IT professional).

The article title "Application Development is Dead", seems a touch melodramatic, to say nothing of premature. That said, however, Mr. Varhol gets his point across nicely. When tools for development are limited the results will be far reaching.

He states "... we lust after abstraction, and there are an infinite number of ways of achieving it."

Mr. Varhol then states his concern: "Nevertheless, choice is starting to find itself in relatively short supply..."

When technology radically changes short supply isn't new. When Windows 95 was released there were only a handful of development suites ready for the (relatively) new 32-bit architecture. The biggest names were Delphi (Object Pascal) and Visual Basic. Mr. Varhol's concern seems to be rooted in the fact that the cloud computing architecture currently maintained by a few could limit what tools or frameworks are even accessible. He may well have a point. Since early 32-bit application development was created on your own system, there popped up infinite languages to use. Not so with cloud computing.

As a pragmatist I believe that the market will dictate availability (provided corporate and government coercion abate). That said, change is still a comin'. So be prepared for changes to how you access your applications, to say nothing of the new look, feel, and (hopefully) features.

Remember that learning curves can be one of the biggest challenges to system administrators. We get so close to the few products we use on a daily basis that we sometimes don't take the time to learn about new technology and the products and services that these advancements spawn.

Given the budget crisis that many businesses are facing it is likely that you will be denied your request for training dollars. If this is the case, remember the oft cited refrain: "What is your career worth to you?" (I suppose another way to say it would be: "Go fetch that rusted crowbar out of your shed and pry open your wallet.")

If Mr. Varhol assumes correctly that choice of development will be limited, system administrators will feel the effects in the future releases of sys admin tools. Be prepared. Technology is moving faster than any bureaucracy can predict (or control). It would be easy to be left at the side of the road.

Don't let that happen to you.

Gartner released a new study today which shows what most sys admins have known for some time; IT spending is down. Way down.

While the report focuses on the retail segment I believe it is indicative of the industry as a whole. That's one reason why I was fascinated with the book "FREE: The Future of a Radical Price", by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired.

The book is a very positive look at the spending habits of consumers in a digital age. I believe it is must read material for businesses and consumers.

Recessions will come and go but the emergence of a new marketplace revolving around "free" is really remarkable.

The book is available for free as an audio book.

    Photo by meddygarnet

I've always said that there are two kinds of people:  Those who backup and those who will. After working on computers for as many years as I have, I've had a number of mishaps that keep me firmly in the first camp. Nothing so major as losing a whole hard drive of important data, but enough small losses to keep me constantly on edge. I have several layers of back up in my backup plan, and here's a peek into the mind of the paranoid backupper.

I actually have two back-up plans, one for my personal data and one for my professional. They're different for a couple of reasons. My personal data is several times larger than my professional, for one, my personal data is all on Apple Macs while my professional is on Windows, and most of my professional data is already versioned in source control. In this post I'm only going to go over my personal backup, and leave the professional for another day.

I have 3 layers of backup:

1. Hourly back-up using Time Machine.
2. Weekly back-up using rsync and two rotating portable hard-drives.
3. Weekly off-site backup using a custom python script and an FTP server.

Some details. I have 3 Macs to keep backed up and about 80 GB of data between them (including photos, e-mails, documents, and what-not) so I bought a 500 GB Time Capsule to replace my ageing wireless router. That works really well, and I've used it on more than one occasion to retrieve a past version of a file. The Time Machine interface is quite a bit of eye-candy (it's pretty sluggish even over Gigabit Ethernet) but it got the job done on the rare occasion that I've needed it.

I then have two portable hard-drives when I swap between my office and my shed every week where I use rsync to backup the three Macs. With one copy always in the shed I should be protected against all but the biggest disasters.

My last layer is off-site. I tried a variety of different cloud backup solutions but wasn't happy with any of them. They each had one flaw or another that I didn't like. Using Mozy, for example, restore was far too slow to be practical; I waited several hours just to retrieve a couple of files. I hear that they've made improvements, but I've already moved on. Mainly, with the commercial solutions I didn't like the idea of having my back-up in some form that I couldn't access directly. That's why I decided to write my own last year.

I wanted something that I could manage myself and that would use the lowest common denominator, FTP. I have a web server with GoDaddy that has unlimited disk space that I thought I'd use. I created a python script that finds any file that has changed, compresses it, encrypts it, and uploads it to the server. But with a twist. I take the MD5 hash and size of the file and turn that into a signature, and only upload the file if a file with that signature isn't already on the server (the odds of a signature clash between two different files is astronomical.) Now, even if I copy a file from one computer to another it will only be uploaded once to my FTP server (which is handy when you only have 384 kbs upload speed.) I can move whole directories around and there's no problem.

There you have it, my paranoid backup. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't trying to degauss your disk... or something like that.

    Photo by loop oh

Check here for a document detailing many Windows 7 keyboard shortcuts. Most of them are standard shortcuts but hey, why not a refresher course?

My favorites are still around:

WindowsKey+R to open the Run window

WindowsKey+D to show the desktop

ALT+D select the address bar

F2 to rename an object

    Photo by Pixel Addict

Knowing how your systems manage memory is critical to your job as a sys admin. With Windows 7 coming down it's also critical to know what to expect. This will be particularly helpful when you are ordering new systems and preparing to migrate older apps to newer OS's.

The first resource to tap is MSDN. Microsoft provides a table for its OS's. You'll note that Win7 is not listed. ZDNet did post the limits on their Hardware 2.0 blog.

I suggest checking out Mark Russinovich's blog on the topic. Physcial memory is his first article in his "Pushing the limits of Windows" series (he just posted number four).

    Photo by Don Hankins

I love TinyURL. I've used them for two years. I've donated to their cause and I use them constantly. I suppose it's this love affair that helped the following blog jump out at me.

Brian Krebbs points out in his Security Fix blog that spammers and virus writers have gotten wise to our love, and now thanks to Twitter, our dependence upon URL shortening sites (over 90 strong and growing).

The upshot seems to be that there isn't a universal approach to URL shortening. For safety purposes you need to know where that URL is taking you. Brian suggests several tools which allow URL expansion.

• www.longurlplease.com (Long URL Please)
• www.expandmyurl.com (Expand my URL)

I suppose it's a good example of two steps forward and one step back. My Facebook friend Gary just reported that he got hit with one of these viruses and that the bugger completely hosed his HD. Anyone else got horror stories or suggested solutions?

When writing batch files, it's common to spit the output of a command to a file using the redirect operator.

C:\> somecommand.exe > output.txt

For some commands this doesn't work correctly and you don't get all of their output. You can see an example by using the dir command.
C:\> dir aa: > out.txt

In this case, the error message doesn't go into out.txt, it still gets written to the console. Why is this?

All command line programs have two channels of communication with the console. One is called "standard output" and the other is "standard error." Typically data goes to standard output and error messages go to standard error. In the example above the data went to out.txt but the error message went to the console. There is a special version of the redirect operator for the standard error channel:
C:\> dir aa: > out.txt 2> error.txt

Now the error message gets written to the error.txt file and nothing goes to the console. But what if you want both channels to go to the same file, just as they would normally go to the console? You can't use the same file name for both channels, you need to use a special file name for the error redirect:

C:\> dir aa: > out.txt 2>&1

This tells the error channel to write to the same file as the standard output. For the sake of completeness, you can reverse the files:

C:\> dir aa: 2> out.txt >&2

Hopefully this little tip will make all of your batch writing more fun (and you thought it was already as fun as it was going to get!)