Windows RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) is a suite of tools from Microsoft that allows IT administrators to remotely manage and administer Windows Servers and other Microsoft services from a Windows client machine. These tools are essential for system administrators to perform various tasks without needing to log directly into the server.
Here is a list of some of the primary tools included in RSAT:
Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC): A graphical interface for managing Active Directory.
Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC): A tool to manage users, groups, computers, and organizational units in Active Directory.
Active Directory Sites and Services: Used to manage the configuration of Active Directory sites, subnets, and services.
Active Directory Domains and Trusts: Manages domain trusts and functional levels.
Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell: Provides a set of cmdlets for administering Active Directory.
DHCP Server Tools: Includes the DHCP Management Console, DHCP Server cmdlets for Windows PowerShell, and the Netsh command-line tool.
DNS Server Tools: Includes the DNS Manager snap-in and the DNS Server cmdlets for Windows PowerShell.
Group Policy Management Tools: Includes the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) and the Group Policy Object Editor.
Hyper-V Tools: Provides the Hyper-V Manager snap-in and the Hyper-V Module for Windows PowerShell for managing Hyper-V servers.
File Services Tools: Includes the File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) snap-in and command-line tools, and the Distributed File System (DFS) Management snap-in.
Network Policy and Access Services Tools: Includes the Network Policy Server (NPS) console and the Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) console.
Remote Desktop Services Tools: Includes the Remote Desktop Licensing Diagnoser Tool, the Remote Desktop Services Manager, and the Remote Desktop Connection Manager.
Server Manager: A tool for managing roles and features on Windows servers.
Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Tools: Includes the WSUS console and PowerShell cmdlets for managing Windows updates.
Failover Clustering Tools: Includes the Failover Cluster Manager snap-in and PowerShell cmdlets for managing failover clusters.
Storage Explorer Tools: For managing storage area networks (SANs).
IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools: Includes the IPAM client console and PowerShell cmdlets for IP address management.
Best Practices Analyzer (BPA): Tools that help administrators ensure their servers are configured according to best practices.
Below I’m checking to see if the RSAT tool I want (the Group Policy Management Tool) is already installed – as it returned State: Not Present I then installed it
A couple of months ago a brown jiffy bag landed on my doormat, this is not an unusual occurrence in my house, with Technet updates, and corporate freebies I’m guessing my postman is not my biggest fan 🙂
So with a brief scan of the label and seeing the word “Microsoft” I tossed it on the table and went to work.
Later that evening I got out my Technet Folder and started the monthly chore of updating CD’s and throwing the old ones away, I was surprised to find a letter and two CD’s.
“Dear Mr Long, it was a pleasure to meet you at the MVP summit in [somewhere in America I forget], as promised please find a copy of Windows Longhorn as promised etc”</p?
Now this was surprising because I’ve never been to America in my life, and the possibility of there being two Pete Longs who are both MVP’s is just too great – so either (a) its a mistake or (b) someone’s been to liberal with their “Mail Merge”.
About two months later my boss asked me to build a backup PC at work to do some scripted offsite backups – so I thought I’d make this mundane task more interesting by using Longhorn to do it.
NOTE: This is the Beta 4074 Version of Longhorn (as such not everything works as well as it will) The setup screenshots were taken at home using Virtual PC.
Solution
OK in goes the CD, it does’nt get recognised? bah! I put it in my laptop, it gets recognised – It’s a DVD, in fact two enormous DVD’s. I share the Laptop DVD drive and install over the network, now I’m going to need some other method of getting screenshots. I continue on the work one, but take the disks home and install Virtual PC 2004 and load it up there.
So now I have a crash course in Virtual PC 2004, load up, it seems a bit sluggish, but I’m also running Outlook, Quickpost, and a host of other stuff so I can’t complain.
All looks very “Server 2003-ish”, at work the resolution was much better so I assume this is due to VPC.
This looks a bit more cool, point to note: 15 to 25 minutes left it says, I go get a coffee – on return it says 15 minutes – at this point the whole exercise matches the speed of a two legged dog – dragging a boat anchor – uphill – in the snow 🙁 I go and do my weekly shopping, wash the car, clean the barbeque and return – the display defiantly says 14 minutes left – I go and watch “Underworld” on DVD on return it says 6 minutes.
At last something happens – it’s unlock code time (I had to download this from the Microsoft secure web site earlier) the time counter goes back to 15-25 minutes and I loose the will to live – and click OK.
After about 2 minutes 🙂 the EULA pops up, like every other person in the civilised world I did’nt read it and ticked “yes I agree”. In the event of my death, my soul is now the property of Microsoft 🙁 Also note we are back at the magic 15-25 minutes again.
At last things to click – I try to change the input locale to UK – its locked to US, as is the keyboard, not a problem for me at home cause I’ve got a US Keyboard but at work that’s gonna annoy the hell out of me.
Again this is in VPC so I can’t change anything – I’ve no choice but to accept the defaults and click continue.
Again time stands still, I get bored and go in the front room, I get my daughter to tell me if the screen changes (cause I’m a considerate parent)
“Dad the screens changed!” Ah looks like we are booting in to Longhorn at last methinks 🙂 I put the kettle on and return to my desk.
So- far so good, Time for another jolt of Caffeine.
Coffee finished I start to get bored again its getting late and this is taking forever – its like watching a Windows 98 PC defrag – (why are the blue and red dancing squares so hypnotic) I kill time by counting how many times the hourglass does a summersault and again loose the will to live at about 15315 times 🙁
“Dad its changed again!” Note “This can take up to 10 minutes” In the time it took to do this I could have walked into town bought a complete PC in component parts, walked home and assembled it – after drinking 14 bottles of Absinthe 🙁
OK – In reality at this point VPC and I fell out, it booted into Longhorn set itself to 4 bit colour, and ran like like an asthmatic seal. This like all the problems above I put down to VPC and NOT Longhorn, the remainder of the shots are from the clean install PC I did at work. Which annoyingly took 15-25 minutes to install 🙂
AAAAAARRRRRGGGHH! My eyes are bleeding! – Who in their right mind at Microsoft decided to use that as the default desktop! I decide the decision must have been made by someone who wears “Red Dwarf” T Shirts and had no girlfriends at school. Just as I get used to the XP “Teletubbies Hill” I’m assaulted with that 🙁
I read on other sites that the new sidebar has a “wealth of features and it’s a great new addition to windows” I decide I fear and loathe change and disable it instantly, I might have been more open but the clock looks like a cheap plastic one you would get in the bargain bin at B&Q, that runs on 1 AA battery. The clock knows this and returns to annoy me later.
Now this I do like! – search straight from the task bar! I do a search for *.msc to see if they have included any cool new mmc consoles I can play with, it searches for “Files containing text: *.msc” There is nowhere in any search command to change this 🙁 Conclusion – yes leave it there its cool, but fix it.
I like! Very clean – At first the folder icons take a bit of getting used to, but the bits you can see inside them are actually what’s in the folder (small things please small minds)
At first I thought “Oh no where’s the [up directory] button” but the path at the top becomes a row of buttons when you hover over them which is much better.
OK – I’m building this thing to do some temporary backups so I need to create a folder to put them in, right click > New > folder? And its not there 🙁 damn! this is the way I create new folders, in fact its the way I always create new folders! The more observant of you will have spotted the “Make new folder” button before I did, I click it, nothing happens, I click it again – still nothing. in fact I have to drop to command line and issue an MD command to make a new folder (Mental note to self – DONT use Beta OS’s for work things).
At this point I decide to fire up IE (v6) and take a look at PeteNet, there’s no Java 🙁 I zoom over to Sun to download Java – Sun Tells me….</p?
“Warning you are using Windows XP – This version of Java works best on Windows XP”
I smile – the PC crashes, after a reboot I try Microsoft JVM and it works fine. You can schedule and alter the priority of your downloads, this is the best (working) thing I’ve found.
PeteNetLive Longhorn Style 🙂
<p?The forward arrow stays hidden (till its needed) and this is where the “history” folder is hidden – this makes the main window a lot cleaner.</p?
Seeing as I spend a lot of time in Device Manager I fire that up, the interface is horrible, I mess around with the view to make it slightly less horrible – who am I kidding this is terrible! All the technical bits I know how to play with are not there!
Reeling from the above I quickly run devmgmt.msc and my old friend (thankfully) re-appears looking like it should.
Hovering over pictures gives a nice thumbnail view.
I then proceed to write a backup script and schedule it, at this point I notice the time says 06:49 AM (its about 14:15 PM) reluctantly I launch the cheap plastic clock again. it cant be altered, no amount of clicking or dragging helps me, I drop to command line and issue a TIME command and reset the time, it remains unchanged, I download and install atomic time, it remains unchanged, from command line I force it to take time from the Domain Controller, still no change. The cheap plastic clock mocks me from the corner of the screen.
I discover that (quite obvious already to most of the techies reading this) that’s its in the wrong time zone, after some tweaking and poking around its on GMT. WHY does every Microsoft install set the time to Tijuana time?
Does Bill Gates live in Tijuana? In fact how many people live in Tijuana, that every release of every Microsoft product I’ve ever seen set its time with Tijuana – Time is set in Greenwich! hence all other time zones are +/- GMT
There are probably a wealth of other things under the bonnet I’ve missed, or been to lazy to talk about – apart from the plastic clock and the “Grandmothers Curtains” desktop, its a promising well polished (even for a Beta) OS
<p?Hopefully BillG or SteveB will read this and send me the next Beta Build so I can test the bits that look promising but are not yet working, at least by then I’ll have worked out how to put Mickey Mouse hands on the clock.
NEXT WEEK: Pete lifts the lid on the Arc of the Covenant!
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If like me you’ve spent a large part of your life hanging out of comms cabinets with serial cables programming routers, switches, and firewalls etc,then HyperTerminal will be an old friend. So I was a bit put out when I couldn’t find it in Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8.
The Microsoft Web site says,
HyperTerminal is no longer part of Windows. However, you can use Telnet. It’s a simple, text-based program that you can use to connect to another computer over the Internet. If you previously used HyperTerminal to troubleshoot modem problems, use Phone and Modem Options instead:
Open Phone and Modem Options by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking Hardware and Sound, and then clicking Phone and Modem Options.
Note: You might need to provide information, such as your country or region and any special phone dialing rules, in the Location Information dialog box before you can access the Phone and Modem Options dialog box.
Well that’s all well and good, but I use it for Terminal Emulation – and I don’t want to fork out for expensive products like Prism or Host Suite.
Now I’ve seen some posts that claim you just need to copy hypertrm.dll and hypertrm.exe from an XP machine to the vista machines system32 directory then Start > Run > hypertrm {enter}
However – You can still download HyperTerminal as an application from the people who made it (Hilgraeve )
Solution
This one runs quite happily on Vista (Tested on Vista Ultimate V6.0 (Build 6000)), Windows 7 (Tested on Windows 7 x64 Ultimate (Build 7601)), Windows 8 (Tested on Windows 8 Pro (Build 9600)).
Note: Linux Users for a terminal console click here
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Telnet has not been in the default build of Windows since Windows Vista – this is troubling if your a tech and need to program things or test connectivity to mail servers etc etc…
Fear not you can still use telnet (if you prefer you can use Hyperterminal instead of basic telnet). You just need to load it in.
Solution
1.Click Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features.
2. Select “Turn WIndows Features on or Off”
3. Select “Telnet Client” > Then Click OK.
4.Windows will now install and enable Telnet so it is available from command line.
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If Like me you haver to open multiple RDP sessions to lots of different clients, who all have differend domain names and passwords then the move to Vista can be a shock to the system, as far as RDP goes anyway. If you want to bend the version of RDP shipped with vista to behave like the old one did in XP you will need to the following.
Solution
1. Locate your default.rdp file (it’s usually in my documents).
2. Now open this file using notepad. Start > run > notepad > File Open > Change the file type from txt to “All files” > navigate to default.rdp and open it.
3. Paste the following two lines onto the END
EnableCredSSPSupport:i:0 prompt for credentials:i:0
4. Then Start > Run mstsc {enter} > Options > Advanced > Change server authentication to “Do Not attempt authentication”
* Pre v 6.00
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Any files or folders with the attribute “H” are not shown in windows explorer by default, if you would like to see them you will need to “show hidden files,folders or drives”
Solution
Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008
1. Click Start > Control Panel.
2. Locate and Launch Folder options > View Tab.
3. In the “Hidden files and folders” section > select “show hidden files, folders and drives” > Apply > OK.
Telnet client from Windows, and have it as an “Optional Extra”. For most people that’s fine, but for anyone who programs network devices, or needs to test that ports are open, or test mail flow by telnet to port 25, that’s a pain.
After renaming (because you didn’t want to lose the profile) or deleting a user profile, from the “users” directory. You will see the following error when you attempt to log on as the deleted user;
Error: You have been logged on with a temporary profile You cannot access your files and files created in this profile will be deleted when you log off. To fix this, log off and try logging on later. Please see the event log for details or contact your system administrator.
You will also see Event ID 1511 logged to the machines application log.
Solution
1. Log on to the machine with administrative rights.
2. Click Start > In the Start Search box type Regedit {enter}.
4. Here you will see the SID (Security Identifier) for all the users on the machine, you will notice one has .bak on the end of it.
5. Delete the entire key that ends in .bak then reboot and log on as the user in question.
How to properly delete a user profile
Note: You might want to take a backup of the c:users{user_profile} folder first.
1. Click Start > in the Search/Run box type sysdm.cpl {enter} > Select the Advanced tab > User Profile Section > Settings.
2. Locate the offending profile and select delete > then confirm.
Deleting Multiple Profiles
Update 28/01/13 (Email form Rick Sparrow)
If you have several profiles to remove, this method can be quite time consuming. There is a command line utility called delprof2 that works the same as Microsoft’s old delprof, but is compatible with Windows 7. You can remove all inactive profiles instead of one at a time.
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This was asked on EE the other day, and I’ve been asked it before, so I put it on my list of “Articles to write up”. Windows by default will display all “Enabled” accounts on the welcome screen. In most cases that’s fine, but the poster had installed SQL and all the service accounts were listed.
Solution
Option 1
Updated 09/08/12
Site visitor (Fehlmann Paolo ) Emailed in to suggest a better method of removing users from the logon screen. Essentially this removes ALL the local accounts from the login screen and only leaves the username and password option.
1. Here’s my test machine setup with multiple local accounts.
2. Log as a user with administrative access > Start > In the Search/Run box type regedit {enter} > Navigate to the following key;
[box]HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Policies > System[/box]
Locate the ‘dontdisplaylastusername’ DWORD and change its value to 1 (number one).
3. Now you will get the following.
Option 2
1. Log on as a user with administrative rights and launch the registry editor.
4. Right click the SpecialAccounts key, and create a new key.
5. Call this one UserList.
6. In the right hand window, right click and create a new DWORD (32 bit) value.
7. Create a value for each account you want to hide. By default its value will be 0 (zero) to stop hiding an account (in you require this in the future), you can delete the DWORD or change its value to 1 (one).
Note: You CAN create a value for Administrator and hide that in this way, however it’s considered “Good Practice” to have the local administrators account disabled, so that’s what I’m going to do.
8. Right click Computer and select Manage.
9. Navigate to “Local Users and Groups” > Users > Administrator > Right click >Properties.
10. Set “Account is disabled” > Apply > OK.
11. Now we have a much cleaner welcome screen.
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