Netexceed blog by Jason Mohan» Netexceed by Jason Mohan

Terminal server exceeded maximum connections

Jason Mohan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:20:01 +0000

Don’t you hate that message when you need to logon to a server for a few minutes to change something. This usually means someone forgot to logoff their RDP connections (actually two connections must be opened and left in a idle state), and now you need to logon to the server. Now you can go through terminal services manager, and log that user off, but sometimes you need to get on immediately and don’t have time. Use the below command in “computer name” field when you are connecting to a computer through RDC, and you will logon to the console immediately.

Depending on which version of RDC you have one of the below commands should work:

Computer Name: computername /admin

Computer Name: computername /console

Running commands on remote servers

Jason Mohan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:08:27 +0000

We have many citrix servers, but whenever I need to run one simple command I hate to go to all my citrix servers to run on. I wish I could just connect to one server, and access the command line for all the other server. Well you can, as I soon learned with psexec. It’s a Microsoft tool (formerly sysinternals), and you can download it here. Below is how you use it.

psexec \\RemoteComputer cmd.exe

Now your at the command line of the remote computer. This requires the admin$ to be on (which it usually is).

Repairing file associations

Jason Mohan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:02:39 +0000

Have two versions of the same software that open the same file extension? Having trouble getting windows to open the right one. We had this same problem with Crystal reports (.rpt extension), but setting it in the file types options in windows did not work. However the bottom command worked in our citrix farm. Don’t put this is a batch file because the %1 doesn’t flow correctly.

change user /install
assoc .rpt=rpt_auto_type
ftype rpt_auto_type=”C:\Program Files\Business Objects\Crystal Reports Viewer 2008\CrystalReportsViewer.exe” “%1″
change user /execute

Send your events log to sql

Jason Mohan — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:29:06 +0000

Recently I had to turning on auditing on a file server. However turning on auditing was fine but what to do with the logs. The max recommended size for logs are 65Mb. However within 4 hours I was hitting that 65MB limit, and my oldest logs would start erasing. There are some tools out there that can help you, but nothing beats building your own. While I was researching how to archive my logs in a format I want, I stumbled on LogParser by Microsoft. This tools allows you to save your logs to SQL, CSV, TXT and provides only the information you want. All I wanted archived was the date/time stamp, the user, and what they did. This tool helped me accomplish that. I highly recommend you try it, if you need to archive, or audit logs. Click here to download from Microsoft, or here LogParser.msi to download from this site. Below is a code I used to extract the security log with the time stamp, eventid, sid, and the message into a file.

LogParser “SELECT TimeGenerated, EventID, SID, Message INTO c:\temp\security.txt FROM \\SERVERNAME\security” -resolveSIDs:ON

Print Spooler nightmares?

Jason Mohan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:44:06 +0000

Got a print spooler that won’t start, or crashes everytime you start it. Well here’s a last resort fix that should bring it back up. However this will remove all printer drivers, print monitors, and printers off of the machine. If you are able to access the registry on the machine you can at least write down the name, share name, ip, and printer driver used for each of your printers (see below for those instructions). This instructions are for Windows Server 2003.

Write down your current printers, drivers, and share names (if you can access the registry)

1. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers

2. There you will see a listing of all the printers loaded on that machine.

3. Click on one of each of them, and you will see the NAME, PORT, and SHARE NAME of that printer.

4. You will need to write them down for each printer.

Fixing and Cleaning the Spooler with CLEANSPL.exe

1. Download the Windows Server Resource Kit at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en

2. Now run the cleanspl.exe tool that came with resource kit.

3. Remove everything except these two, Standard TCP/IP Port, and BJL Language Monitor.

4. The tool will tell you to reboot your machine, reboot it.

5. After the reboot the spooler should be running once again, now comes the hard part of having to reinstall the drivers, and printers.

Domain not defaulting on windows logon

Jason Mohan — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:39:55 +0000

All of a sudden the server name would be the default to log into instead of the domain name. This was frustrating our users, who were used to logging in just with their username and password, they never worried about the log on to box. So I found this fix after some research.

1. Open regedit

2. Navigate to My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Change the key DefaultDomainName to your default domain, and that’s it. Try logging in now.