After a restart of the Altiris Services or the Altiris Server some machines refuse to reconnect.

They are shown in the Computers Tree with the Inactive state icon:

The fastest way to resolve this is to restart the “Altiris Deployment Agent” service.

I wrote a little commandline tool to make this easy for myself, it’s called AClientFix.

If you don’t specify any parameters it will restart the services on the local machine. If you specify a Computername as parameter it will restart the services of a remote machine (admin rights needed of course).

I needed to relocate the WSUS content folder because it was placed on the C Drive (even though there was a 2nd 150 GB Data Partition) to prevent WSUS from filling up the OS Drive.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a GUI option to do that, all Google searches lead to a GUI option for Small Business Server.

The WSUSUtil tool can do it however, which is located in %ProgramFiles%\Update Services\Tools by default.

You need to create the targetfolder and then issue:

The tool will copy, and not move, the files to the new location and update the WSUS settings.

So don’t forget to manually delete the old folder!

The current storage location can be found or verified in the registry. It is stored in the ContentDir value in the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Update Services\Server\Setup key.

See also Verifying WSUS Server Settings (although in incorrectly states the ContentDir value as Content).

For my Reboot Script I needed to get the last character of the computername and convert it to an integer.

We can do it like this in PowerShell:

I wanted to create a Scheduled Task on my Citrix Servers to have the reboot every other night.

The idea is that half of the servers will reboot in a night and the other half the following night.

The TSSHUTDN tool is handy since it can issue a warning to logged on users, log them out after a certain period and finally issue the reboot.

Since I needed to add a scheduled task to many servers I wanted to do this with a script.

WMI Exposes the Win32_ScheduledJob Class and it’s Create Method.

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In every project I do I will have to migrate data at some point. This usually involves three types of data:

• Home Directory Data
• Workgroup Data (eg office documents)
• Application Data (not database but flat file data belonging to applications such as templates and documents).

Home Directory Data is usually a flat copy although I tend to filter out the garbage (temp files and such).

Workgroup data usually needs to be cleaned up so it involves some kind of data mapping (folder x goes to place y).

Application Data is usually a flat copy from old to new location but often there are things like ini files that are adjusted and we don’t want to overwrite that.

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As you may know, Fast User Switching (FUS) is not available (disabled) on Windows XP computers joined to a domain, Microsoft confirms this in kb280758.

However, Microsoft doesn’t tell us there’s an undocumented registry value that allows us to have FUS when joined to a domain!

To enable FUS you need to set the DWORD registry value HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ForceFriendlyUI.

It can also be set by Group Policy at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System.

When the value is set to 1, and LogonType key is also set to 1, it allows you to use a Friendly UI on a computer joined in a domain:
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If you want to obtain a user’s token in a Terminal Server or Citrix session (eg to launch a process in a session) you can call the WTSQueryUserToken function.

On the x64 versions of Windows XP and Server 2003 this function fails however and returns ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER (“The data area passed to a system call is too small.”) when called from a 32 bit process.

Internally WTSQueryUserToken calls the undocumented function WinstationQueryInformationW with the WinStationUserToken class (14) and passing a WINSTATIONUSERTOKEN struct, filled with caller ProcessId and ThreadId.

But on x64 Windows the size of this structure is 24 bytes, while on 32 bit Windows the size of the structure is 12 bytes!

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I don’t do much programming in .NET based languages but I have to for some things like the Windows Live Writer plugin I am creating.

I didn’t expect this but the String.IndexOf Method is by default case sensitive.

But we can make it case insensitive if we use one of the overloads: IndexOf(String, StringComparison).

Example:

On a Citrix XenApp 5 environment a user reported that he was unable to start a Full Screen session on a Dual Monitor Configuration.

He received this error message:

Citrix has a KB Article: “How to Allow More Memory for Session Graphics on Windows Server 2003” that explains exactly how we can solve this.

We need to change the MaxLVBMem registry value and we can use the Excel Sheet from the KB Article to calculate the proper value.

Please don’t set this value too high because a higher value means you will restrict other kernel memory pools.

You also need to deny the SYSTEM account the SetValue permission on the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management key to prevent the Citrix IMA service from overwriting the new value.

So I wrote a small PowerShell script to change the permission and set the value:

If you want to be able save the password in Office Communicator you must create the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Communicator or on x64 OS HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator and set the DWORD value SavePassword to 1.

Now you will have the Save my password checkbox (which will save the encrpted password to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Communicator\AccountPassword