Windows Server 2008 Tips & Tricks

1. You can free up disk space on your servers by disabling hibernate. Windows 2008 will create a hiberfil.sys equal to the amount of RAM. This is very useful with VMs that have lots of RAM but smaller C: drives. To disable hibernation, and reclaim that space, run this command:

powercfg -h off

2. You can get to the complete collection of Sysinternals tools online. You can even invoke them from the run command. Use the url: http://live.sysinternals.com or the UNC path: \\live.sysinternals.com\tools.

3. Speaking of the Sysinternals tools, almost any command line in this article can be run remotely on another machine (as long as you have administrative rights) using the psexec command included in the Sysinternals tools.

4. You can kill RDP sessions at the command line when you find that all the RDP sessions to a server are tied up.

regsvr32 query.dll [enter] You only have to do this the first time.

query session /server:servername [enter]

reset session # /server:servername [enter]

5. You can create a list of files and display the last time they were accessed, which is very useful when a network drive is low on space and users swear they have to have that copy of Office 2003 on the network. My advice? If they haven’t touched it in two years, burn it to DVD or write it to tape and then delete it from disk:

dir /t:a /s /od >> list.txt [enter]

6. The Microsoft Exchange Err command is one of the best all around troubleshooting tools you will find, as it can decode any hex error code you find as long as the products are installed on the machine. Download it from here.

7. You can see all the open files on a system by running this command:

openfiles /query

8. You can pull all the readable data out of a corrupt file using this command:

recover filename.ext

9. Need to pause a batch file for a period of time but don’t have the sleep command from the old resource kit handy? Here’s how to build a ten second delay into a script:

ping -n 10 127.0.0.1 > NUL 2>&1

10. If your Windows website has stopped responding, or is throwing a 500 error, and you are not sure what to do, you can reset IIS without having to reboot the whole server. Run this command:

iisreset

11. You can use && to string multiple commands together; they will run sequentially.

12. If you find yourself restarting services frequently, you can use that && trick to create a batch file called restart.cmd and use it to restart services:

net stop %1 && net start %1