Admin Tools

If you have a Windows Server 2008 box in a workgroup that you require access to one of the admin shares, it can be a little more complicated than with Server 2003. In my case, we had a SQL server on the back end which was trying to access the web server in the DMZ using PSExec.exe to remotely run a process. Executing PSExec and passing the correct credentials failed with “Access is Denied”.

We run to monitoring systems where I work, the first is HP SIM and the second is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Currently, they and their databases all reside on a single rather battered server, “MONITOR1”. I’ve installed a new SQL Server 2008 server “SQL1” on Windows Server 2008 to take some of the load, and take advantage of the 64-bit OS and SQL installation. Both servers are part of the domain “DOMAIN”

So, you’ve installed a new server with Server 2008 R2 Core – what next? Logging on, you’re presented with a shiny command prompt, you can run notepad or regedit…but aside from that, where do you go from there? In the next few series of posts I’ll hopefully point out the basics, and some not so basics! I’m going to look at some management tasks – the bread and butter of being a Windows admin.

If, like me, you want to administrate your Windows 2003 servers from your Vista workstation, you may find that you recieve an “MMC could not create snap in” error when you open one of the admin tools, it also manifests as corrupted graphics within some MMC Add-ins. It appears that the dlls are not registered correctly, there’s a KB article from Microsoft that contains a script to reregister the dlls. It’s a simple fix: Copy and paste the following script into a text document, save it as RegisterAdminPack.