Saturday, October 23, 2010

ServerSentinel - The Monitoring Tool for Servers

ServerSentinel is the reliable and automated monitoring software for servers, network services, such as HTTP, POP3 and IMAP, hard drives and memory usage. With various monitoring sensors and individually definable testing intervals, ServerSentinel monitors systems for failures and irregularities.
If failure or irregularity is tracked, ServerSentinel notifies you in real time via e-mail, text-to-speech output or acoustical warning sound. This immediate notification allows taking precautions to avoid system failure and limitation of availability.
ServerSentinel can take immediate action by running automatic scripts or programs that can take corrective actions as needed.
Logged failures, reported irregularities and other performance data will be stored in a dedicated database. All recorded data can be used for future analyses regarding system failures and server performance bottlenecks which guarantees reliable control of all systems.
With ServerSentinel, you have your servers under control.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Try IE9 Beta NOW. . .

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Windows Internet Explorer 9 (abbreviated as IE9) is the upcoming version of the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft. It is currently available as a public beta version, released on September 15, 2010.

IE9 supports the HTML5 video and audio tags and the Web Open Font Format. Some industry experts claim that Microsoft will release IE9 as a major out-of-band version that is not tied to any particular version of Windows.


The system requirements for IE9 are Windows 7 or Windows Vista SP2 (with Platform Update and IE8); Windows XP is not supported.Both 32-bit and 64-bit builds are available.

Download Now. . . 

A Great free Antimalware from Microsoft "Microsoft Security Essentials"


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a free antivirus software product created by Microsoft that provides protection against different types of malware such as computer virus, spyware, rootkits and trojan horses for Windows XP (x86), Windows Vista, and Windows 7 (both x86 and x64).Microsoft Security Essentials replaces Windows Live OneCare, a commercial subscription-based anti-virus service and the free Windows Defender, which only protected users from adware and spyware. Unlike Microsoft Forefront family of enterprise-oriented security products, Microsoft Security Essentials is geared for consumer use.
Microsoft Security Essentials received positive reviews upon its release.

 

Personal WDS on Windows Server 2008 R2 Implementation Guide

 
  1. Install, configure and update Windows server 2008 R2.
  2. Add WDS (Deployment and Transport servers) and DHCP roles.
  3. Download and Install the recent version of Windows AIK.
  4. DHCP Configurations:
    1. Create a scope and configure it with the required options.
  5. Reference Computer Configurations:
    1. Install windows, drivers, updates and applications.
    2. Copy the “deploy” (including the sysprep files) folder from the windows DVD from the “Support” folder into the partition that you want to capture.
    3. From the “Deploy” folder user the “Setupmgr.exe” to create an answer file for the mini setup wizard (sysprep.inf) and place it in the same folder as your sysprep files.
    4. Use the “sysprep.exe” to sysprep the partition using mini, reseal and reboot options.
    5. The client computer will restart, you can go to the Bios to check that the computer will be able to boot from the LAN (PXE).
    6. Don’t go to the next step until you finish the WDS configurations.
    7. When the computer restarts make sure you boot from LAN and after having an IP from the DHCP server press F12 to start connecting to the WDS server.
    8. From the list of boot images select the capture image you created on the server and continue with the wizards until you have the complete imaged from this computer inside the image group you created.
  6. WDS Configurations:
    1. Server Properties:
      1. General Tap:
        1. No Configurations.
      2. PXE Response Tap:
        1. Select “Respond to all client computers (known and unknown)” option
        2. Clear “Require administrator approval” option
        3. PXE Response delay: 0
      3. ADDS Tap:
        1. Default Configurations.
      4. Boot Tap:
        1. For known and unknown clients select “Require user to press F12”
        2. No default boot image.
      5. Client Tap:
        1. Check “enable unattended installation” option and point to the .xml answer file located in “C:\RemoteInstall\WdsClientUnattend”. (This is for Windows PE phase)
        2. Leave other option to default.
      6. DHCP Tap:
        1. Check both check boxes.
      7. Leave other taps to default configurations.
  7. From the Windows 7 DVD inside the “Sources” folder copy the “boot.wim” file to your server hard disk.
  8.  From the WDS console inside “Boot Images” add a new boot image and point to the Windows 7 boot.wim file.
  9. Right click on the newly created boot image and select “Create Capture Image”
  10. Now you should have 2 images and both are x86, if you need a x64 bit images you should repeat the steps but use the boot.wim file from Windows 7 x64 DVD:
    1. The first boot image is for booting the client computer for installing the new install image.
    2. The second capture image is for capturing an image from a reference computer.
    3. Go to the “Install Images” node and right click and select “Add image group” with any name.
    4. If you didn’t uploaded the install image from the reference computer to the WDS server through the capture wizard yet you can right click on “Install Images” node and select “Add install image” and point to the .wim file taken from the reference computer.
    5. Now you can install this image on any client computer by booting the computer from LAN and use the first boot image (not the capture image) and when prompted select the install image you want and the setup will start.
  11. Answer Files Configurations:
    1. We have 2 answer files that we will use:
      1. Sysprep answer file (sysprep.inf) for the mini setup wizard:
        1. Created by the Setupmgr.exe from the deploy folder and placed on the sysprep folder on the reference computer.
      1. Windows PE answer file (unattend.xml) for the Windows PE setup phase:
        1. Download a sample from the web and customize it with “Windows system image manager” from the Windows AIK tools and place it inside the WDS configuration in the “Client” tap.
  12. Extra Configurations:
    1. You can open and manipulate the .Wim files by using “ImageX” command line tool from Windows AIK tools:
      1. Open CMD and go to this path “Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\x86”
      2. Create a folder in C:\ called “mount PE”
      3. To mount the .wim file (extract it) use (where “c:\winpe\boot.wim” is the path to .wim file):
    2. ImageX /mountrw c:\winpe\boot.wim 1 c:\mountPE
      1. Now you can open the folder “mountPE” and start manipulating the files.
      2. To dismount the .wim file back use:
    3. ImageX /commit /unmount c:\mountPE

Windows Deployment Services

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Windows Deployment Services is a technology from Microsoft for network-based installation of Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Remote Installation Services.WDS is intended to be used for remotely deploying Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, but also supports other operating systems because unlike its predecessor RIS, which was a method of automating the installation process, WDS uses disk imaging, in particular the Windows Imaging Format (WIM). WDS is included as a Server Role in all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008, and is included as an optionally installable component with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2.

Free Network Monitoring Software

From SpiceWorks.com:

Looking for network monitoring software? From Spiceworks easy-to-use interface you can:
  • Create & view alerts for Windows events
  • Monitor the health of your MS Exchange server
  • Monitor network bandwidth
  • Track disk space, software installs, anti-virus subscriptions, toner levels, offline servers & more

Completely Free.

Spiceworks is completely free…and you can get started in less than 5 minutes.

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