This is the BLOG and technical resource site for Chris Davis. I work for Microsoft as a Windows Platform Engineer in the consulting services division (MCS).
I'm also a magnet for some pretty odd technical issues and I love to share. You'll find that a large part of this site is dedicated to performance troubleshooting/tuning and also to a large degree, Active Directory.
This site is also a mirror for my 9z.com site and a launching pad to my YouTube channel. So if anything here interests you, follow me on:
So a quick little bit of background on this one. If you’re already using RDCMan (a.k.a. Remote Desktop Connection Manager) you’ve probably noticed it hasn’t been updated in a while. It isn’t an “official” Microsoft project, it isn’t open source, and the last version of it was released quite a while ago.
I won’t go into why, let’s just say that it wasn’t *ever* an official product and they guy who wrote it didn’t really ever expect it to get as large as it got.
There is a similar product that is still being actively updated. It is called Terminals, it lives at codeplex, and it is open source. Which means that if there are problems with it in the future, anybody can help resolve them.
One major issue I ran into was organization. You can import computers from AD or you can import computers from an existing RDG file (RDCMan’s database) but you cannot get the groups to import this way. I manage thousands of servers so just having a big flat file wasn’t going to work.
I wrote a PowerShell script to help you to populate a Terminals XML Favorites file using your Active Directory OU structure. You can download it here (right-click and then save as). Hope it helps!
Q: So why the name 9z?
A: Well that's my actual website address. What does it mean? Nothing. It's just a really cool short-dot-com I've had forever. I like to use it because it is easy to remember (last number and the last letter... dot com). It was supposed to be pronounced ninez like... "The Ninez" but that turned out nearly impossible to communicate verbally without having to then turn around and also explain how to spell it.... so these days I just usually say 9 Z.
Q: Hey Chris, don't I know you from somewhere?
A: Possibly. I've worked in IT for 20 years and a lot of that was traveling. I've been to almost all 50 states and spent 5 years of that on the road... 42 or more weeks a year. (that's over for a while thankfully). I also teach a lot of workshops on Performance Troubleshooting, Windows Server, Active Directory Troubleshooting, and other various topics. So maybe you were in one of those?
But... the reality is you probably are just thinking of that baseball player.
Q: Are you BigDaddy9z
A: Yes, one and the same.