Windows

Get file or folder permissions using PowerShell

The Get-Acl cmdlet in PowerShell’s Security module (Microsoft.PowerShell.Security) does a great job of getting file or folder permissions (aka the Access Control List or ACL). But getting useful info from the default output can take some getting used to. Instead, it’d be great to simply be able to see what the Security tab of a […]

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Enable remote desktop (RDP) connections for admins on Windows Server 2016

Windows Server 2016 has reached the General Availability (GA) milestone today. You can download it from your volume licensing site or MSDN. You can also create Azure VMs with Windows 2016. The latest and greatest Windows Server has many new Remote Desktop features. See What’s New in Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2016 for […]

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Choosing the right ultrabook: Asus Zenbook, Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro

If you spend greater part of your workday on a notebook/ultrabook, selecting your primary work tool is as important as selecting race cars is to race car drivers and selecting cameras & lighting equipment is to photographers. Some obsess over it more than others. I confess to being firmly in the latter category. I won’t […]

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Make Bing the default search engine in Firefox address bar

I like Bing for a number of reasons. If you don’t prefer Bing, this is not a sales pitch to make you change your search habits. I’ll leave that to the Bing team with BING IT ON, the Bing Challenge commercials et al. Bing offers a better user experience. I also believe Microsoft has better […]

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Installing Windows from a USB Drive, recovery partitions and TRIM support

USB flash drives have been a welcome development for computer storage — they offer a great alternative to optical drives (aka CD/DVD drives). The form factor makes them easy to carry around, they’re faster than optical drives, and you can rewrite/reuse them as many times as you wish. They’re also more reliable than optical media. […]

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Import user attributes from OpenLDAP

Recently I imported the employeeID (and a few other attributes) from an OpenLDAP directory into Active Directory. Problem was different distinguishedName attributes in both directories – the OpenLDAP directory had a different OU structure. The Problem We have a LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) dump from OpenLDAP in the following format : dn: distinguishedName not […]

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Got Win2003 Adminpak on XP and don’t see the Dial-In tab..

Adminpak installed on XP Pro does not reveal the Dial-In tab on user’s properties. Here’s how to make it show up : Registry Entries – copy the following text in notepad and save as dialin.REG (don’t forget to change file type drop-down to All): Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt]@=”” [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt\CLSID]@=”{B52C1E50-1DD2-11D1-BC43-00C04FC31FD3}” [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt.1]@=”” [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\RasDialin.UserAdminExt.1\CLSID]@=”{B52C1E50-1DD2-11D1-BC43-00C04FC31FD3}” [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MMC\NodeTypes\{19195a5b-6da0-11d0-afd3-00c04fd930c9}\Extensions\NameSpace]“{B52C1E50-1DD2-11D1-BC43-00C04FC31FD3}”=”RAS Dialin […]

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Calling Control Panel applets from shell

A list of command line options for calling control panel apps. Particular pain points – adding/removing programs and Windows components takes too many mouse clicks, and so does getting into a network adapter’s TCP/IP properties. You can call the Add/Remove Programs window by typing appwiz.cpl, and to get into Add/Remove Programs | Windows Components, type: […]

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