Brad Rutkowski's Blog

How to catch shutdowns that don’t go to debugger or cause bugchecks

Sometimes a system just goes offline or reboots and we cannot catch it in the debugger or it is not...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/25/2007

Hey Admins! Windows System State Analyzer (Beta)

Windows System state analyzer toolHelps create snapshots of the computer—some of which include fixed...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/24/2007

Domain not available when trying to TS onto a Windows 2003 server.

Issue came in this week where when you attempted to logon to a server it would not authenticate your...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/16/2007

Discrepancy in volume size when you extend a volume with DISKPART

Had an issue come in today where the customer requested that one of their drives on SAN storage be...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/15/2007

The case of Windows Defender not starting.

Had a client whose machine would not load Windows Defender, each time it was opened it would...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/14/2007

How to know if TCP offload is working

So you went out and got yourself a new server and it came with TOE functionality, and now you're...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/10/2007

Debugging a virtual machine with VMRCPlus

This is how it should look, at least this is what's working for me. Loving VMRC BTW. I'm kind of...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/08/2007

Vista: Two hotfixes now released to improve performance, compatibility, and reliability.

https://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194 This update resolves some compatibility issues and...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/07/2007

Vista and 2k8: Enabling Debug mode on boot up.

Pre-Vista it could be an issue if you didn't have debugging turned on via the boot.ini file and your...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/07/2007

XBOX 360 price drop

Technorati tags: XBOX If you haven't got an XBOX 360 yet maybe now you'll reconsider, or have new...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/07/2007

Hey Admins! Don't be a hater, be a collaborator (Windows Meeting Space)

I have to say I am quite pleased with this little gem in Vista. Once I started using it I haven't...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/06/2007

Net Send in Windows Vista

You might find yourself looking for "net send" in Vista and wonder where it went? Before you flip...

Author: BooRadely Date: 08/06/2007

Are there pending operations waiting for a reboot?

Sometimes you might log onto a server and wonder if there have been patches installed and thing...

Author: BooRadely Date: 06/27/2007

Great tool for Windows 2003: Server Performance Advisor (SPA)

First off you can download SPA 2.0 here. I'm going to explain how to quickly use SPA, and then what...

Author: BooRadely Date: 06/26/2007

Republish printers easily on a print server to Active Directory.

Printers can get pruned from the directory for many reasons. The way it is supposed to work is if...

Author: BooRadely Date: 06/25/2007

Windows Server 2008: TechED 2007: IIS will be able to run on Server Core.

Watching the TechEd keynote and Bob Muglia just announced that IIS will be supported as one of the...

Author: BooRadely Date: 06/05/2007

Services and Session Zero in Vista and Windows Server 2008

If you've been running vista you might have come across this message: "A program can't display a...

Author: BooRadely Date: 06/04/2007

Windows Server 2008 Beta3: Can and RODC be a GC?

Answer: Yes. If you're looking to deploy some RODCs during the B3 timeframe then it would be a good...

Author: BooRadely Date: 05/30/2007

Identity and Access in Windows Server 2008

Want to know what is changing or what's new in the Active Directory space from Win2k8? Then follow...

Author: BooRadely Date: 05/23/2007

People squatting on your TS sessions?

Something that administrators deal with quite a bit is trying to connect to a machine using remote...

Author: BooRadely Date: 05/14/2007

Other useful commands for those running ServerCore.

I pointed out in my last post a reference to the step by step guide for server core but here's a few...

Author: BooRadely Date: 05/11/2007

Deploying a Server Core server during Beta3?

If so you'll probably install and then be sitting at the command prompt and asking yourself: Now how...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/30/2007

How to easily calculate your system availability (uptime).

We all have managers and ALL managers love that little word called metrics, and ALL managers like to...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/24/2007

REPADMIN /ADD I've shown you the beauty of REPADMIN /REPLSUM * /BYSRC /BYDEST /SORT:ERROR to easily...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/20/2007

What's crashing on my vista machine?

Reliability Monitor will show you what is crashing on your machine, but how do we find the status of...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/18/2007

What variations of sleep does my computer support? And why did it wake up?

POWERCFG has the answer to that question and many others, like -LASTWAKE will tell you why your...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/18/2007

Hey Admins! Let's explore Vista together. (Part 1)

Okay so let's look at some things in Vista from a sys-admin perspective that are good to know when...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/13/2007

Did you know there is live noninvasive debugging?

Say you want to check something out in KD but you don't have a debugger attached, like !vm perhaps,...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/13/2007

Storport update rolls a lot of changes into one package for Win2k3

KB 932755 was released recently and contains many changes to the Storport driver for better...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/12/2007

Need an easy way to create a unique file name with the date?

I needed to dump winlogon and do some checks against the dump file and needed and easy way to get...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/12/2007

NLTEST returning RPC_S_UNKNOWN_IF

Ran into a case today where NLTEST was returning RPC_S_UNKNOWN_IF. C:\Users\Administrator>nltest...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/12/2007

Debugging Terminal Service not listening. (Isolating an instance of SVCHOST)

Ran into another issue today where I needed to set and IFEO for the particular instance of...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/06/2007

Let me drive! Using remote.exe to connect to a client.

Some might call me a control freak, but when I have the opportunity to investigate a machine myself...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/03/2007

Consequences of running 3GB and PAE together

Well in short, your system could be unusable. Raymond Chen mentions it here how 3GB and PAE conflict...

Author: BooRadely Date: 04/03/2007

The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

Ran into a case today where each time we tried to start sidebar.exe it would fail silently. No crash...

Author: BooRadely Date: 03/29/2007

16 things it takes most people 50 years to learn.

Things It Takes Most Of Us 50 years to learn: 1. The badness of a movie is directly proportional to...

Author: BooRadely Date: 03/25/2007

Vista Wallpapers...

https://www.hamaddarwish.com/content/index.html If you like the cool filters used in some of the...

Author: BooRadely Date: 03/24/2007

Using Wevtutil on Longhorn server core servers to scan the event logs...

In some cases you might find that you need to scan the event logs locally on a server core machine...

Author: BooRadely Date: 03/24/2007

These are a few of my favorite things... (Part 2)

sl.exe Download Now It’s just like portqry but with some things that make it beneficial for scripts…...

Author: BooRadely Date: 03/24/2007

Mark Russinovich: Technet Webcast on Windows Hang and Crash Dump Analysis (Level 400)

For those of you out there who want to do crash and hang dump analysis this is a good technet...

Author: BooRadely Date: 03/21/2007

New Dcdiag switches for Windows 2003 SP2

If you want to see what else is coming your way fro SP2 check out this link. This is nice, because...

Author: BooRadely Date: 03/12/2007

Windows Server taking a loooong time to reboot?

Recently we ran into a dmp where the machine was taking quite a long time to shutdown. Each time the...

Author: BooRadely Date: 02/27/2007

Making your app prompt for elevation in Windows Vista

You find yourself in a situation where you may want your app to run with privileges. In this case...

Author: BooRadely Date: 02/20/2007

Can you have a mix of 32 and 64 bit domain controllers?

I see this questions come up quite a bit about the interoperability of x86 and x64 domain...

Author: BooRadely Date: 02/08/2007

MSI package that won't install on Vista? Stale packages keeping you down?

Here are some things you can do to help troubleshoot the issue. 1) Turn on MSI verbose logging....

Author: BooRadely Date: 02/06/2007

Searching for Vista drivers?

This is a nice consolidated location for a lot of Vista drivers. Of course I make no guarantees if...

Author: BooRadely Date: 01/31/2007

Using Natural Language Search to find files in Vista

Saw this on https://on10.net/Blogs/jesse/natural-language-search-in-vista/ and found it very cool....

Author: BooRadely Date: 01/31/2007

How to change the network binding order in Vista

You would think that its just the same, and in a sense it is. In Vista though they hide the menu by...

Author: BooRadely Date: 01/31/2007

Find out the members of the local administrator group remotely.

Want to find out who is in the admin group on a box in your domain and don't have privileges to...

Author: BooRadely Date: 01/05/2007

Great Art

If you haven't checked out https://www.zune-arts.net yet then you're missing out on some really cool...

Author: BooRadely Date: 12/06/2006

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