Bharat Suneja

Getting Dell Service Tag using WMI

Need to maintain an accurate inventory of servers in datacenter. Dell servers have a Service Tag that is required when calling Dell support, and it makes sense to include this in the server list. Here’s how to retrieve the Service Tag from the system BIOS. This uses WMI, and therefore works only on Windows servers. […]

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Long string error viewing/editing Group Policy in GPO editor

If you try to view/edit a GPO in the Group Policy Object Editor on Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server or Windows XP SP1, you get the following error:The following entry in the [strings] section is too long and has been truncated. Why does this happen? Older version of GPO Editor cannot interpret some string […]

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Reinstall XP without activation

Ever needed to reinstall the OS on the same system and wondered if it’ll still activate? This lets you reinstall Windows XP without having to activate it again: Copy the file %systemroot%\system32\wpa.dbl (to removable media like floppy/CD if you plan to reformat the drive and do not have Reinstall Windows XP Copy the file back […]

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Windows Beats Linux in Live Security Contest

Interesting… I’ve since long held Windows as a more easily “securable” (provided you know how) OS. This just came in – from WinInfo Daily Update (Paul Thurrott, creator of SuperSite for Windows, part of the Windows IT Pro mag network).—————————————————– Windows Beats Linux in Live Security Contest During a live duel of sorts between backers […]

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Blackberry Enterprise Server upgrade to BES 4.0

UPGRADING FROM BES 3.X If you are running BES 3.x, the upgrade to 4.0 should theoretically be a simple one, but here are things to do before you click setup.exe:1) If running MSDE 7.x, upgrade to MSDE 2000 (shows up as MSDE 8.x in the admin tool). This is done by running setup.exe with upgrade=1 […]

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Microsoft to acquire Sybari Software

Microsoft will acquire Sybari Software, the company that makes best-of-breed antivirus (and antispam) products for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SPS, and (yes!) Lotus Domino. Another best-of-breed acquisition to bolster Microsoft’s security portfolio – it bought Giant Company recently and is currently beta-testing the Microsoft-branded version of Giant’s antispyware. In mid-2003 it purchased the Romanian antivirus company […]

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Scripting: ExchangeClusterResource Class – Reply from Alain Lissoir

The ClusApi.h file, which is part of the PlatformSDK should contain this… typedef enum CLUSTER_RESOURCE_STATE { ClusterResourceStateUnknown = -1, ClusterResourceInherited = 0, ClusterResourceInitializing = 1, ClusterResourceOnline = 2, ClusterResourceOffline = 3, ClusterResourceFailed = 4, ClusterResourcePending = 128, ClusterResourceOnlinePending = 129, ClusterResourceOfflinePending = 130 } CLUSTER_RESOURCE_STATE; HTH Alain is (now) WMI Program Manager at Microsoft and […]

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Scripting: ExchangeClusterResource class

The WMI ExchangeClusterResource class has 5 properties: 1) Name: returns name of Exchange cluster resource 2) Type: specifies the cluster resource type (IP Address, network name, etc.) 3) Owner: specifies the cluster node that the resource is running on (changes with failover) 4) VirtualMachine: returns name of the Virtual Machine that owns the resource 5) […]

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Exchange joins Microsoft’s Billion Dollar Club, gets new product roadmap

It happened in 2004. Microsoft Exchange Server crossed the $1 billion revenue threshold, joining Microsoft’s enviable stable of products that the software company can rely on for more than a billion dollars in revenues each year. http://entmag.com/news/article.asp?editorialsid=6534 Exchange also got a new (ever-evolving?) product roadmap SP2 will be released in second half of 2005. It […]

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HOW TO: View the Security tab in Exchange Admin tool

Every time I get asked this, I remember the name of the key – ShowSecurityPage – but forget the complete path. It’s easier to simply keep the registry hack in a .REG file, so here it is. Right-click on the link, save, remove the .txt from the filename. ShowSecurityPage.reg If you’d rather do it manually, […]

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