Category Archives: SysAdmin

Systems Administration Topics

Use Group Policy Preferences to hide a physical drive

Posted on 19 July, 2010 by Daniel

Just saw this note whilst browsing the help on Drive Maps in Group Policy Preferences: You can use a Drive Map preference item to configure the visibility of a physical drive rather than a mapped drive. To do so, select … Continue reading →

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Vista: “Access denied” error when attempting to map a printer

Posted on 16 July, 2010 by Daniel

Another printing-related issue I experienced this week was as follows: I set up some new printers on the print server, and shared them out I then used Ricoh’s “Default Editor” application to lock down the colour printing options When attempting … Continue reading →

Posted in Printing, SysAdmin, Windows | Leave a comment

Vista: Print spooler crashing repeatedly

Posted on 16 July, 2010 by Daniel

Had a problem today where a printer driver became corrupted on our print server. This, in turn was causing the Print Spooler service on the workstations to crash repeatedly. I was unable to delete the mapped printers through the normal … Continue reading →

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Quickly test Windows-auth logon to a SQL DB as a different user

Posted on 10 June, 2010 by Daniel

If you need to make a test connection to a MS SQL DB as a different Windows user, and you’re not using SQL authentication, you can do the following: runas /user:domain\sqluser “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe” You’ll then see the following … Continue reading →

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Self-sign your Powershell scripts

Posted on 21 April, 2010 by Daniel

Creating my first Powershell script, I came up against code execution issues. Rather than take the easy (sketchy) way out and simply enable execution of unsigned code, I went and figured out how to sign my scripts using my internal … Continue reading →

Posted in Scripting, SysAdmin | Leave a comment