As it turned out I realised that if a bit of paper was covered by another (or in fact covered by anything) it wasn’t that important to the execution of my role and could probably be thrown in the bin.

At the time I was not using Microsoft Office at home, opting to use OpenOffice for the limited needs I had for productivity software. I did however want a better way of organising my paperwork at home, OneNote 2007 came in at about £70 which isn’t unreasonable for what you got. Then I discovered Evernote.

Seemed perfect, I don’t generate so much paperwork that I would bust the 40mb/month limit on the free account. In the end I decided to adopt Evernote at home and continue to use OneNote at work, it proved quite a handy separation of work and life.

Recently I have run into two problems that are pushing me towards using Evernote for everything, and ditching OneNote entirely:

1. Evernote handles PDFs really well, you drag them in and they are displayed using the Foxit rendering engine. It just works. OneNote on the other hand plain old embeds them into the note, great now how is that different from having them in a folder in My Documents.
2. Evernote 3.5 has vastly improved the synchronization mechanism meaning that I can safely put something on Evernote on my PC and it will be on my laptop shortly after it is turned on next. Microsoft has tried to get this kind of functionality into OneNote and SharePoint however it just doesn’t work that well, it is too slow and there seems to be a 10 minute refresh cycle hard coded into the product.

I am still not sure that I want to ditch OneNote entirely, the 2010 version has some nice labour saving devices built in such as quick screen clippings and image formatting with the fluid user interface. Nothing in OneNote 2010 screams “don’t leave me” though.

I am sure I am not alone in knowing least 5 commands that I use day in and day out to manage workstations or servers on the network. I thought I would take the time to share some of these with you now.

dirquota

Windows 2003 R2 Only

dirquota is part of Windows 2003 R2 File Server Resource Manager (“FSRM”) which I use to manage quotas on home areas and shared folders. dirquota is the command line mechanism for managing the quota portion of FSRM, with the number of users we have it is important that we can modify quotas quickly, something the FSRM Quota GUI is not good at.

There I two basic forms I use every day:

dirquota quota list /path:<path>

Simply enough this will create a report for the path including peak usage, current usage and quota limit along with dates and times useful when determining what to do with the quota. Usefully the verbs quota and list can be abbreviated to q and l respectively, which saves a bit of typing.

The second form is to modify quotas:

dirquota quota modify /path:<path> /limit:<limit>

The command does what is expected; modifies the quota on the path to the specific limit. Again the verbs quota and modify can be abbreviated to q and m, in addition the limit parameter can be expressed in units, f.ex, 50MB, 500MB, 1G, 20G.

robocopy

All Windows Platforms

Robocopy (or Robust Copy) is the Swiss Army Knife of file copy tools while it doesn’t have a GUI it is more than capable of doing taking on any copy job. Originally part of the Windows Server Resource Kit it is not a standard command in Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server.

Typing “robocopy /?” at the command line might be slightly overwhelming however there is one boiler plate command that will do the job.

robocopy <source> <destination> /E /ZB /COPY:DAT /R:3 /W:10 /XJ /XF *.tmp ~$*.doc

<source> and <destination> can be local paths, mapped drives or UNC paths.

• /E – copies files and folders recursively including empty folders, if you want to exclude empty folders replace /E with /S.
• /ZB – copies files in restartable mode, if that fails due to an access denied error then use backup mode, this will require administrator access to work, use /Z if you are not running as an administrator.
• /COPY:DAT – copies only Data, Attributes and Timestamps useful when taking a copy to move to a new file system and re-apply permissions from scratch. Check the help pages for information about other options.
• /R:3 /W:10 – Retry three times, wait 10 seconds between tries. Important if you have an Anti-Virus product configured to scan on access as you may get System Error messages when trying to access these files.
• /XJ – Exclude Junction Points. Very important for Windows Vista as the user profile “Application Data” folder points to itself causing recursive and eventually failing copy operations.
• /XF <filespec> – Exclude Files. There is rarely any point in copying temporary.

wuauclt /detectnow

All Windows Platforms

wuauclt stands for Windows Update Automatic Update Client, yes it is a bit of a mouth full, /detectnow is a simple operation to kick off the Windows Update client to detect if updates are required rather than relying on the detection schedule.

dsquery, dsmove

The Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) Microsoft Management Console Add-on is sufficient for the majority of Active Directory operations. There are situations where it is useful to be able to script an operation, for example the mass moves of objects from one location to another.

I tend to use Microsoft Excel to to transform a text file report to a list of directory commands, most recently I moved all laptops that had not accessed the domain for the past six weeks to an “Lost Computers” OU. At which point I disabled the computer account through ADUC.

dsquery computer -name LTA3-44 | dsmove -newparent “ou=Lost Computers,dc=domain,dc=co,dc=uk”

icacls

Windows Vista, Windows 2003 SP2 and Windows 2008 Only

icacls is the long awaited replacement to cacls and xcacls providing command line access to modifying Windows NTFS Access Control Lists. icacls provides more flexibility that cacls and xcacls making it a essential skill to learn for manageing mass permission changes on disks with many different users.

icacls /grant DOMAIN\rslater:(OI)(CI)F /T

• /grant DOMAIN\username – grants the specified permission to this user, /deny is also an option however one to be careful of.
• OI)(CI) – not some strange smiley, but means Object Inherit, Container Inherit, applies only to directories and means files and folders within the folder will inherit permissions from the folder.
• /T – recurse directories.

Final Thought

Every Systems Administrator, Programmer, Hacker, Scripter and Helpdesk Operator must have at least 5 commands that make their life easier, if you have posted about these commands on your blog please do leave a link in the comments. Equally if you think of a command while reading this blog entry feel free to post it in the comments.

After all, all of those jokes that zip round like wildfire whenever something happens in the news aren’t just the creative juices of the masses expressed in a short message, they are written by the networks to encourage people to send more messages (by passing the jokes on).

All is not lost however, I have been using jTwitter for a long time and it does a great job of keeping me up to date on the move. The Twitter API seems good enough to allow anyone too interface with the service without extensive programming knowledge – I suspect we will see more services that allow access to Twitter from a mobile phone.

The multiplayer is great fun too. I had some initial issues connecting in the first place due to PunkBuster connect issues, resolved them by updating PunkBuster manualy with PBSetup.exe then running the game as Administrator under Vista 64.

All in all, great game – well worth the spend, and brought a lot of enjoyment to my Christmas.

The Options

1) Wireless Network – 802.11g provides a maximum wire speed of 54mbps which results in a typical throughput of 25-27mbps, our existing 802.11b network gives us a typical throughput of about 4mbps which is below that of our broadband service (6.6mbps – Zen Internet ADSL Max Service)

In terms of costs Amazon has a Linksys Wireless-G Router for £38.00, we would need to spend a further £14.99 for a Wireless-G PCI Card. There may be cheaper options available and I expect shopping around would get the cost in at about £50.

2) Wired Network – Cat 5 or ideally Cat 6 provides the fastest speeds available, as we can implement Gigabit Ethernet giving us a theoretical throughput of 125MB/sec although some of this is lost due to TCP/IP overheads. To be fair with only one computer Gigabit is not required, all of my existing equipment is 100MB/sec compatible. The main cost will be the installation of the wires which would be require going through two walls and covering about 30 metres of wire.

Maplin sells Cat6 at £99 for 305m (~33p/meter) or 79p per meter of custom lengths, wall plates, of which I would need two of to cable between my computer and the utility room, are available from Maplin for £4.49, a crimp tool comes in at £21.99 and a punch down tool at £12.95 from Cable City. In total this comes to £67.62.

3) Power line communication / HomePlug Network – this is a fairly new technology and there is no official standard so interoperability between manufacturers is not good now, and is not guaranteed in the future. These devices suffer from interference generated from the products connected to them, so for example anything that “dirtys” the ring circuit, i.e. speakers, amps, desk fans, vacuum cleaners, will affect performance.

Prices range from Solwise 85Mb HomePlug at £27.22 adapter to a Solwise 200Mb HomePlug adapter at £50.61, other than a selection of cables to connect between the adapters and the sockets you don’t need anything more than the adapters.

Summing Up

Price

Of the three options the Wireless Network is cheapest, closely followed by the HomePlug Network then the wired network, it could be argued that you could borrow the crimp and punch down tools making the wired network cheapest at £41.14.

Extensibility

The wired network is the least flexible by far, further connections require further runs of cable and terminating boxes, you can future proof to an extent by buying lots and lots of cable and using a Patch Panel at the hub of your network. HomePlug networks can be extended by adding extra HomePlug kits, they should all work together as long as they are similar products, however it is still unsure as to what would happen when a product is no longer available, without clearly defined standards it is difficult to tell, there is however a HomePlug Powerline Alliance who define the specification for HomePlug 1.0. The Wireless network is the most extensible as there is no practical limit to the number of people you can have on your network, most Wireless Routers and Wireless Access Points support 25 or more users.

Latency

Being a gamer, and particuarly an online gamer means that Lag or Latency are important to me, higher latency means that things I do in a game take longer to reach the server, so the lower the latency the better. Wired networks come out by far the best, along my existing 100MB Cat5e cable I get <1ms response times to the router, on the 802.11b wireless network I get about 3-5ms response times. HomePlug networks claim that they are low latency, however without one to test I can not say how low it actually is.

Finally

I have not decided what I want to go for yet, I am leaning towards the wired network for the low latency properties, however this HomePlug network has peaked my interest.

1x Abit AN8 SLi nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) £102.17
Reasons: SATAII RAID for future proofing, SLI for future expansion
1x ThermalRight XP-120 £39.89
Reasons: Never faulted previous models
1x Vantec SF12025L Stealth 120mm fan £9.34
Reasons: Quiet yet fairly high (59) CFM
1x AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) £149.17
Reasons: Good “bang for your buck”
2x Corsair 1GB DDR XMS3200C2PT £187.88
Reasons: 2GB for MMOGs, overclockable
1x Lian-Li PC-60 PLUS Silver Aluminium Midi-Tower Case £93.94
Reasons: Looks Good (dumb reason)
1x Tagan TG430-U15 430W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU £56.34
Reasons: Pleanty of power for future proofing, detachable cables
1x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 NCQ 160GB ST3160827AS SATA 8MB Cache £62.22
Reasons: Seagate’s quiet and fast in my experence, NCQ
1x Leadtek WinFast GeForce 6800 256MB DDR TV-Out/DVI £146.82
Reasons: Good “bang for your buck”

Total: £847.77

Any comments appreciated