IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine July 2010

July 26th, 2010

The new IT Toolbox column has been posted to the TechNet Magazine website. This month, I covered 3 cool tools:

  • PowerShell SSH Server: Secured remote management
  • Genie Timeline Professional: Fire and forget backups
  • StressLinux Project: Stress your new system builds

Check it out and let me know what you think:

July 2010 IT Toolbox for TechNet Magazine

As always, if you have a suggestion for a product to cover, please let me know.

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine June 2010

June 23rd, 2010

The new IT toolbox column has been posted to the TechNet Magazine website. This month, I covered 3 cool tools:

  • Password Reset Pro: Simple web-based AD password management for end users
  • PerfectDisk 11 Server Edition: Keep your server’s HDD arrays tuned up
  • FastCopy: Copy files faster

Check it out and let me know what you think!

June 2010 IT Toolbox for TechNet Magazine

As always, if you have a suggestion for a product to cover, feel free to email me via tntools@microsoft.com.

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine May 2010

May 12th, 2010

The new IT toolbox column has been posted to the TechNet Magazine website. This month, I covered 2 useful tools:

  • SmartDeploy Enterprise: Virtualized, simplified, and easy to manage system images
  • Tweak7: Make Windows 7 run how you want it to run

Check them out and let me know what you think!

May 2010 IT Toolbox for TechNet Magazine

As always, if you have a suggestion for a product to cover, feel free to email me via tntools@microsoft.com.

IT Toolbox: TechNet Magazine April 2010

April 13th, 2010

The new IT toolbox column has been posted to the TechNet Magazine website.  This month, I covered 3 cool tools:

  • VirtualBox: Free and open source virtualization platform for Windows
  • CPU-Z: Check out detailed stats on your CPU and memory with this free tool
  • Prime95: Stress test your new PC or server before you let it loose

Check it out and let me know what you think!

April 2010 IT Toolbox for TechNet Magazine

As always, if you have a suggestion for a product to cover, feel free to email me via tntools@microsoft.com.

Quickly Create Test Users on your Domain Controller

April 7th, 2010

If you are looking for a quick way to create test users in your domain, you can do so through the old NET USER command.  You will have to run this on your domain controller’s command prompt.  The following will create 200k test users:

for /l %i in (1,1,200000) do net user TestUser%i p@ssw0rd /domain /add

If you need to tweak more of the details of the test accounts, there are a number of other options for the NET USER command, but you most likely will want to take a look at the more robust tools out there like csvde.

Thanks to Daniel Petri for this little nugget.  For a more in depth view of your options for quickly creating test users, check out his post here:

http://www.petri.co.il/create_users_for_testing_purposes.htm

Hope this helps!

So I got a fake Intel Core i7-920

March 10th, 2010

Perhaps you have seen the hub-bub about the counterfeit Intel Core i7-920 chips that were sent out across the country between March 1st and March 4th from NewEgg.com (via their distributor)? Well, I got one of these “chips” myself!!

Here’s the write-up on the box I received over at GearLog.com from Dan Evans:

Hands On: Unboxing the Fake Intel Core i7-920

Check it out!

(By the way, NewEgg dealt with this efficiently and quickly offering me either a full refund or another chip via expedited delivery.  Their service rocks! )

March 2010 IT Toolbox – TechNet Magazine Online

March 5th, 2010

The March 2010 TechNet Magazine posts on the website. Check out my IT Toolbox column here:

March 2010 TechNet Magazine IT Toolbox

In this issue I covered:

  • Alloy Navigator Express: Asset, Help Desk, and Inventory Tracking
  • CleanAfterMe: Clean up your tracks
  • KBAlertz.com: Hot fix and security bulletin website

Check it out and let me know what you think!

And if you have a tool you want to see me review, please suggest it to me here: tntools@microsoft.com.

February 2010 IT Toolbox – TechNet Magazine Online

February 19th, 2010

The February 2010 TechNet Magazine posts on the website. Check out my IT Toolbox column here:

February 2010 TechNet Magazine IT Toolbox

In this issue I covered:

  • Input Director: Control multiple Windows systems with one keyboard and mouse
  • IPNetInfo: Query multiple WHOIS servers on sets of IP addresses
  • QweryBuilder: Manage multiple database types through one interface

Check it out and let me know what you think!

And if you have a tool you want to see me review, please suggest it to me here: tntools@microsoft.com.

Shrinking your Transaction Log with SQL Server 2008 to Free Disk Space

February 5th, 2010

If you have been used to clearing up disk space on your development and test SQL server instance file systems with SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 by using the famous TRUNCATEONLY option on your transaction logs, you might be disheartened that they have removed this option from SQL Server 2008 (with good reason some might say).

If you do try to use it, you will get the infamous:

‘TRUNCATEONLY’ is not a recognized BACKUP option.

To achieve the same effect with SQL Server 2008, you can toggle the recovery mode for the target database and then call your DBCC SHRINKFILE to clear up disk space hogged by your transaction log.

USE MyDatabase
GO
ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET RECOVERY SIMPLE
GO
DBCC SHRINKFILE('MyDatabase_log',1)
GO
ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase SET RECOVERY FULL
GO

(Of course if you are already using simple recovery, you wouldn’t need to toggle.)

Hope this helps!

Don’t get caught by ANSI PADDING, VARCHAR, and trailing whitespace!

January 28th, 2010

One thing to be aware of when you have VARCHAR columns and are using ANSI PADDING: trailing whitespace is trimmed and not counted in your equality ( = / <> / LIKE) statements, so you might not get the results you are looking to be returned from your query.

In the same vein, the len() function will return the same value for two strings if one has trailing whitespace.  If you need to compare those two fields including trailing whitespace values, use datalength() instead.

Here’s some example T-SQL:

DECLARE @TABLE TABLE (FIELD VARCHAR(50))

INSERT @TABLE VALUES ('some text')
INSERT @TABLE VALUES ('some text       ')
INSERT @TABLE VALUES ('    some text')

-- returns 2 :
-- trailing spaces trimmed,
-- leading spaces count
SELECT '"' + FIELD + '"'
FROM @TABLE
WHERE FIELD = 'some text'

-- also returns 2
SELECT '"' + FIELD + '"'
FROM @TABLE
WHERE FIELD LIKE 'some text'

-- shows the difference between len()
-- and datalength()
SELECT FIELD, LEN(FIELD) AS 'Length', DATALENGTH(FIELD) AS 'DataLength'
FROM @TABLE

Hope this helps!