In addition to using the GUI to create accounts and groups, the command line can be used. This is often useful when automating server setup or recovery. net user jsmith tempword /ADD /FULLNAME:”John Smith” /COMMENT:”Accounting Manager” net localgroup “Accounting Local Resource Group” /add /COMMENT:”Payroll and A/R Files” net group “Accounting Members” /ADD /COMMENT:”Members have access […]

The default crontab editor is nano on some systems. This is a pain. You can change this by setting the EDITOR environment variable. In BASH: srv-4 / # set | grep EDITOR EDITOR=/bin/nano srv-4 / # which vi /usr/bin/vi srv-4 / # export EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi srv-4 / # set | grep EDITOR EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi _=EDITOR srv-4 / […]

I encourage every systems administrator, engineer, or architect to watch this. The birth of new systems is presented in three stages: bootstrapping, configuration, and command and control. These stages are analyzed with traditional procedures vs. the vision of Adam and Ezra of a better way. Bootstrapping is facilitated by cloud computing; configuration focuses on expressions […]

Beware! Make sure you have a backup of the registry and are 100% confident of the syntax of the entries before you change anything. If you mess up, your NT system may never boot again, and you will have to reinstall NT. Try to tweak the registry indirectly whenever you can through control panel/services, system […]

If you have a list of servers, you can use the substitution feature in vi to quickly turn that list into a test script. For instance, if I want to test a list of domains that looks like this: domain1.com domain2.com domain3.com domain4.com domain5.com I can insert text before and after the domain name. Here […]

To create a list of regular users in an Active Directory group using the CLI: dsquery group domainroot -name groupname | dsget group -members | dsget user -fn -ln fn ln John Brown Bill Smith dsget succeeded

One problem with upgrading software remotely is that you often need to stop the software you are upgrading first. Often, there is no service that can be stopped. The process must be killed. This can be a bit nasty with Windows systems because there is no easy way to find all instances of a particular […]

Although Windows 2000 can be set up using proprietary (Well… MSified) secure connections via IPSec, there are a variety of problems. Most notable is the difficulty to get secure connections to work across multiple platforms, even between different Windows products. It is quite easy to create keys and pull files securely over the Internet from […]

In this article we displayed our system properties via Tomcat. We were curious, though, how to retrieve these directly through Java. Here is how you can do this: [usr-1@srv-1 java]$ cat FirstProperties.java public class FirstProperties { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println(“System Information: \n”); System.out.println(“Operating System: “); System.out.println(System.getProperty(“os.name”)); System.out.println(“\nArchitecture: “); System.out.println(System.getProperty(“os.arch”)); System.out.println(“\nOperating System Version: […]

There are many tasks that you may want to automate using a custom console. This could be for your Jr. Systems Administrators, for users, or for yourself. One tool that we like to use for this is Visual Tcl, but sometime it is nice to use plain old Visual Basic. If you do use Visual […]

“It is.” is the best answer, really, my friend confided in me over a campfire when describing his and a friend’s 24 hours of trying to unravel the mysteries. I was selling CP/M computers at the time, and he was talking bigger than Information Technology. We all know that IT is as we look out […]

If you have servers or workstations that use RAS to connect to your servers directly or via the Internet, you can use the rasdial command to automate the connection. This would be particularly useful for nightly file transfers. Enter: rasdial /? to get a list of the options for rasdial. For more info on rasdial […]