AppDelivery

Here is a collection of freeware tools, that is useful for windows server admins, at least these has helped me out a lot, the last couple of years;

(This post will be updated as i discover new useful admin tools)

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Recently I needed to move 9 XenApp farm datastores from old SQL2000 servers to new SQL2005 servers. Approx. 150-200 citrix xenapp servers was affected by this change.
A manually way of configuring each citrix server to reflect the datastore change, would be a very time consuming process
Therefore I created a simple batch script to automate this change wíth some simple logging.

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A guy called Patrick Ogenstad has started a great open-source project for documenting servers, called SYDI.
Check out sydiproject.com

Basically it consist of vbscripts taking advantage of WMI (Windows Management Instrumenation) and reqistry queries, which you can use to gather information about a host on your network.

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If you come into a situation where you need to compare the settings of two Group Policy Objects without having to go through each screen one by one, then take a look at the following option to accomplish this.

Pre-reqs.;

• Group Policy Management Console (GPMC)
  www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0a6d4c24-8cbd-4b35-9272-dd3cbfc81887&displaylang=en
• XML Notepad / XmlDiff
  www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72d6aa49-787d-4118-ba5f-4f30fe913628&displaylang=en

Steps;

1. Open GPMC.msc
2. Find the GPO´s you want to compare, right-click the GPO’s and save reports as XML
3. Launch XML Notepad and open the first GPO.
4. Then click “View” > “Compare XML files…” select GPO to compare with.
   ´
   Then all settings which differ is marked with green.

Besides the above approach, I am currently only aware of 3rd party vendors who enables you to compare GPO´s, unless you use Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) Which is a component of MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack). But if you know a smarter method for doing this in a 2003 environment please drop a comment