Resolve GPO GUID to GPO name

“I have a GPO GUID and want to know to which GPO this belongs to?”. If that is your question, you can happily use the below method.  For this you need to have “support tools” of Windows 2003.  You can get it from Microsoft Web Site as well. Alternatively, you can copy search.vbs from any machine where support tools package is installed.

cscript /nologo search.vbs "LDAP://dc=mydomain,dc=com" /C:"&(objectClass=groupPolicyContainer)(name={31B2F340-016D-11D2-945F-00C04FB984F9})" /P:displayName /S:SubTree

You can find more other alternatives ways at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216359

Happy Learning..,

Sitaram Pamarthi

tags:how to find GPO name, GPO GUID to name resolution

Good bye NewSID

When I was with my old organization, we used to deploy operating system with the help of Ghost -- an imaging technique. So, after completing the imaging process, we used to run newsid.exe to make the new installation unique in environment.

But surprisingly, the author of newsid has taken a decision to retire that decade old utility. Believe me, it is no more available at any MS websites. MS suggesting it's customers to user sysprep instead of newsid as sysprep does lot more things which newsid will not.

You can refer to below URL to know reasons behind it's retirement.

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2009/11/03/3291024.aspx

 Happy Learning..,

Sitaram Pamarthi

How to get the CPU utilization of remote machine from command prompt

Use below command if you want to get the CPU utilization of remote machine from command prompt. It's very useful if you don't want to spend time in logging on to the server to verify the stats. Needless to say, replace RemoteMachine with your remote machine name in below command.

typeperf "\\RemoteMachine\processor(_Total)\% Processor Time"

Refer to my old article to know more about typeperf

Happy Learning...,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Collect performance data from command prompt

While browsing for something, I came across this nice windows built-in tool called, "typeperf". This tool redirects the output of performance counter values to command prompt. The normal way for collecting performance values is to open perfmon and configure the options trough GUI to capture the output into some CSV or other file. But this command line tool is very handly to have the counter results from command line.

If some one asked me to monitor the CPU utilization of remote system, I will simply issue below command in my command prompt(ofcourse I need admin rights on remote machine or the account I am using should be member of permon related groups if the remote machine is of a server OS). This command has most of the options that you can set using perfmon.

c:\> typeperf "\\RemoteMachine\processor(_Total)\% Processor Time"

"(PDH-CSV 4.0)","\\RemoteMachine\processor(_Total)\% Processor Time"
"05/20/2009 20:55:11.402","37.682755"
"05/20/2009 20:55:12.465","12.502240"
"05/20/2009 20:55:13.465","33.825223"
"05/20/2009 20:55:14.559","36.987914"
"05/20/2009 20:55:15.668","21.877000"
"05/20/2009 20:55:16.668","3.127480"
"05/20/2009 20:55:17.668","9.377320"
"05/20/2009 20:55:18.668","6.252400"
"05/20/2009 20:55:19.668","10.939780"

Below is the command help and I know you can build your custom command using this. Let me know if you need any help.

Refer this link for syntax and to have more examples. You can type
"typeperf /?" at command prompt to get help on this command.

I WELCOME YOUR COMMENTS;THAT MAKES ME PERFECT:-)

Happy learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi.

Clipboard not working in Windows XP

[Please write in comments session here if this post solves  your clipboard problem]
Many users often complain to their system adminstrator that their clipboard is not working and they are unable to do copy/paste operations and it is the task of sys admins to break their head to find out the reason. Dear sysadmin...no more you need to do that. I came across a good tool which can help you to solve this problem.

This problem generally occurs when a process locks clipboard for reading and writting and didn't release it properly. Clipboard will function normally after killing that process. The tool (GetOpenClipboardWindow) will help you to identify the culprit process. Download this tool now and share it with users.

From my experience, I can say that mostly mstsc.exe is the process which blocks the clipboard. The reason I assume here is simple because it dealts with clipboard of connected computer and your computer.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

tags : windows xp clipboard not working, windows XP clipboard problem, clipboard not working, copy and paste not working in windows, windows copy and paste issue

Nice Screen Recording Tool From Microsoft

While reading TechNet Magazine of March 2009, I came across the this new utility from Microsoft. I have seen many screen capturing recording softwares, but this appeared something special to me for few below reasons...

a) First of all, it is a FREE utility from Microsoft.
b) Giving option for recording activities of a single application window and full screen
c) Captured file is not cumbersome. I recorded for half a minute and the size is 45KB.

It has a very simple interface to start and stop recording. But the captured output can be saved as WMV file only. You can download this tool from Microsoft Download Center

Happy Learning..
Sitaram Pamarthi

Easy way to share your files/desktop with your friends.

I have come across a nice tool which I felt very useful for home users who wants to exchange their data with each other without the intervention of third party.

The general practices for sharing files with internet friends are sending through e-mail or sharing through some websites. All public sites are not as safe as we think. You can take rapid share site for example. Many search engines are available to search and report rapid share content. Though sharing through mail is very secure, size becomes the limitation here. I know, gmail support upto an attachment size of 25MB.

To make internet users happy, a new free aware called "Gbridge" was introduced by Gbridge LLC. The most impressing thing I found with this is, it's integration with Gtalk for authentication service. Yes, you read it right. One need to use their gtalk ID for logging into this tool. After login this tool displays all your gtalk contacts and you can perform the following with your gtalk friends.

- Easy desktop Sharing using VNC and RDP(remember, this is not possible in normal scenario because all home internet connections will run under NAT service.)
- Easy file sharing (file transfer will happen from your computer to your friend computer and no other person can see this data in between)
- Chat with friends like you do with Gtalk
- Explore the tool for many more options

I personally felt that, this tool is very useful because of...

o It's tight integration with Gtalk
o Easy sharing with without a third party intervention.
o Easy remote desktop sharing.

You can read FAQ's for more clarity and download the tool from here.

Happy Learning...
Sitaram Pamarthi.

Copy command output to clip board

The general practices for capturing the command output from command prompt are...


a) Type the command -> capture the output as shown in below window

b) Using redirection
ex: c:\>ipconfig /all > ipdetails.txt

Though both the above mentioned methods seems simple, there is another simplest way to capture the command output to clip board using the clip.exe command. After copying to clipboard, you can copy it to some text file or mail or into any other program.

Usage:

c:\>ipconfig /all | clip

This command places the output of ipconfig command to clipboard. This way is pretty useful when the output you need to capture is very long and command . Clip captures the output regardless of if it is information or error message or output. What ever is the output it simply places into clipboard

Note:Clip command is available by default in windows 2003. If you want to use this in Windows XP, you need to copy clip.exe from windows 2003 server to c:\windows\ directory on XP machine. This is also available for download.

Error codes lookups in windows

In day-to-day windows administration we generally come across many error codes in eventlogs and application specific logs. The error codes generally will be in hex form. We have to search in internet to find the meaning of that error and to troubleshoot further.

Microsoft has provided a good error code look-up tool(err.exe) which simplifies the life of windows administrator. It's a command line tool and we need to pass the error message as command line argument to err.exe and it displays the text explaining the meaning of error message. I found it as very helpful for me to troubleshoot the things and I hope it helps you too :-)

Syntax:

C:\>err [value] [value]…

where must be of one of the following forms:

• Decorated hex (0x54f)
• Implicit hex (54f)
• Ambiguous (1359)
• Exact string (=ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR)
• Substring (:INTERNAL_ERROR)

Download it from Microsoft site. Though it says for exchange, it will work for most of the Win32 error codes.

Happy learning...
Sitaram Pamarthi