Background: In an earlier post I talked about some new features for Windows 2008 and Vista.  One of those new features that is often overlooked are the data collector sets (DCS).  One particular role that leverages data collector sets is active directory.  Active directory has put “hooks...

The Microsoft IPsec Diagnostic Tool is available for Windows Server 2008, for Windows Vista, for Windows Server 2003, and for Windows XP This should help you out when you have those weird "network" issues going on with some clients where IPSEC is deployed. Description from KB: You can use the...

All of these are for kernel mode, these are just commands I use often that don't troubleshoot a particular problem, but are helpful in getting a general picture of the system. If you have a specific issue you're trying to understand, drop a note and I'll see if there is a command to help you out. ...

  Those who are just getting into scripting might be wondering how to query info from remote machines using WMI and how to find useful information to query.  When I started out trying to learn some of the WMI syntax and gathering info,  I started with ScriptoMatic .  I found this...

Just some random stuff as you get ready for 2k8... Getting the Classic cluster logs: Clustering in Win2k8 has undergone some major changes (for the better). One of those changes is that the cluster events are now part of the event stream so sifting through the cluster logs is a thing of the...

You've probably heard that netmon3.1 is out , but you might not know that you can easily launch a capture at the command prompt.  I find this useful when we're waiting on a repro, we want a capture, but we don’t know when that's going to happen.  Sure you could set this up in the GUI...

Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool Project Description: Ever have a performance problem, but don't know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format...

When troubleshooting latency issues I've found it helpful to have firm numbers of how long it took for a command to run? For instance we were looking at an issue where net viewing a server took a long time, but we didn't have firm number of how long it took each time to compare with healthy servers....

I know people have scripted this, but this is so much easier... You could use PSExec for running other commands as well, but someone recently asked me an easy way to get the IP info so here it is. If you just want to be sitting at a command prompt on the remote computer then you could just run "PSEXEC...

Just some more tricks/tools I use frequently... Scale-to-Fit in Perfmon If you deal a lot with perfmon you know you can have a ton of different counters in one line graph or in one bar graph and that the scale is usually 0-100 which really isn't applicable in some cases. Now you can just alt click the...

So when your an app developer or someone in my position where you need to track down memory leaks one of the tools to use is Htrace once you've identified it's a handle leak . I just wanted to put this post out there to show that I found you can use Htrace against a usermode process like LSASS below...

Windows System state analyzer tool Helps create snapshots of the computer—some of which include fixed drives, services, drivers and the registry. Users can create two snapshots at different points in time and compare them to view differences. A detailed report could be generated at the end of a compare...

This is how it should look, at least this is what's working for me. Loving VMRC BTW. I'm kind of doc'ing this for myself as more and more virtual machines are coming online and we're asked to debug them and I never can remember the syntax. On the Virtual machine set it up for debug: Pre-Vista that...

I have to say I am quite pleased with this little gem in Vista. Once I started using it I haven't gone back. It's a real easy way to collaborate with another user(s) when you need them to see what you see or let them drive your session. I've used it about a dozen times when I have a TS session and want...

First off you can download SPA 2.0 here . I'm going to explain how to quickly use SPA, and then what type of data is returned in this post. What is SPA? So what is SPA and how can you use it? Well the official overview is: Microsoft ® Windows Server ™ 2003 Performance Advisor is the latest version of...

I pointed out in my last post a reference to the step by step guide for server core but here's a few other tips for those playing with the GUI-less OS. Remote management with MMCs: Enable remote management in the firewall so you can connect to the dang thing. Actually this goes for LH in general if you...

We all have managers and ALL managers love that little word called metrics, and ALL managers like to know that their service has 99.99% uptime. So how can you easily get this information off a Windows server? Well there is a simple tool out there called uptime.exe . To get the uptime of a server use...

Okay so let's look at some things in Vista from a sys-admin perspective that are good to know when your troubleshooting issues on your client's machines. Your client could be your user base, your family, or yourself. Guided Help You're Dad calls, he wants all the icons on the desktop to go away. You...