I Need Internet Explorer 7!

Q: A developer requested a workstation or server with Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) running and we couldn't find one, as everyone had been updated to IE8 or IE9.
A: We used IE-TAB. 

1. Install Chrome
2. Install the Chrome IE-TAB plugin - http://www.chromeextensions.org/utilities/ie-tab/
3. Visit the site, then click the new "View in IE TAB" button on the top right
4. You can always hit the wrench to change which IE Standards to use, but it defaults to IE7.

Screen Shots through RDP Remote Desktop

Issue: The customer needed to make a screen shot of a window opened inside of an RDP window on their computer.

Solution: Ctrl-Alt-- | Press Ctrl, (while holding that down press) Alt and then the minus key on your numeric key pad.  When you do this you get only the small active window opened inside the active RDP window.

Join systems to a remote domain

ISSUE: We have laptops that are brand new & need to be joined to a customer domain.  Instead of bringing them to the office and camping there for hours we found a way to join them to the domain remotely and perform all the necessary work remotely.

SOLUTION:

1. Log into the PC using a local administrator account. 
2. VPN into work (using PPTP works best for this).  
3. While in, join the system to the domain and reboot.  
4. NOTE: Now here was where it got tricky.  
5. Log into the PC again using the local administrator account.  
6. Again, VPN into work.  
7. Now lock the machine.  
8. And unlock it using your active directory account.  This will make it hit AD over VPN and confirm and cache your domain account (make sure your AD account is in the Local Administrators group on the local machine).  When you unlock it as a different account, it will typically end your VPN session as it closes the users session.
9. When the system has logged out, log in using the domain name as a prefix for your user account (eg: fixit.local\steve.adams).  This will work because windows has cached your password hash.

Netstat - PID - which service is listening on which port

Some basic IP port commands for helping you - in windows.

1. open a command window
2. type netstat -ano
3. This command will display all IP connections and ports on which the system is listening.
4. type netstat -ano | find ":445"
5. This command will display all IP connections involving the port :445. You can run it with "445" but it might include some extra lines where the outbound port includes 445 (eg: 34450).
6. This is extremely helpful to confirm a server is in fact listening on a specific port like :80 or :443.
7. Further, if a server has multiple IP addresses, which IP is listening on which port.

Let's take it a step further:

1. type netstat -ano |
2. TCP    127.0.0.1:7778         0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       2420
   
   TCP    127.0.0.1:7778         127.0.0.1:49257  ESTABLISHED  2420
   TCP    127.0.0.1:9080         0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       4708
   TCP    127.0.0.1:14147        0.0.0.0:0             LISTENING       2120
   TCP    127.0.0.1:16709        0.0.0.0:0             LISTENING       2848
   
   
3. The second to last last column has LISTENING OR ESTABLISHED as a status.
4. type netstat -ano | find "LISTENING"
5. This will show all ports on which the system is listening.
6. The last last column has the Process ID.  Let's take 2420 on this example system.
7. Open Task manager (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC) - click on the process tab
8. click view - Select Columns - Check the box next to PID (process Identifier).
9. NOTE: You may also need to check a box at the bottom "Show process from all users" if it isn't already.
10. Now we find 2420 on this current system at this time to be TracSrvWrapper.exe.

Empty Network Connections

A machine came in with an empty Network Connections window - not even an "add a new connection" object.  After some google searches, most of the time this goes along with the empty device manager issue.  Not this time. Device manager was fine & showed two devices.

Solution:  After trying a number of things on the web (reinstall sp3, netsh winsock reset & registering those three net dll's) what fixed it was simply uninstalling the network devices from device manager & letting it find them again.  Then they showed up in network connections with the other expected objects.