Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Remote Desktop to Your Home Computer Behind a Corporate Firewall

Most corporate firewalls will ban websites such as logmein.  However, they usually won't ban your home URL or your static internet IP address provided by your ISP.

Scenario 1 - Basic Firewall with Non-Restricted Access over HTTPS
For smaller enterprises, they might allow unrestricted outbound access over port 443.  If this is the case, setup your home router to accept port 443(HTTPS) and redirect that to your local PC on port 3389(RDP).

Scenario 2 - Via Citrix XenDesktop
Citrix's XenDesktop Express is free and allow up to four concurrent users to connect to four remote desktop.  It will require seperate servers though, ie
-Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC)
-Provisioning Server for Desktop

Scenario 3 - Terminal Services Gateway
Microsoft 2008 Server can act as a TS gateway and allow external clients to connect to the TS gateway and talk to computers behind the gateway.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Runas Different Credentials In Command Prompt

Sometimes you need to run an executable as a different user via command prompt:
- in scripts
- in Windows 2008 (not 2008 R2), you cannot use shift right click to "run as different user"

Windows come with a command line tool called "runas", which allow users to execute anything as a different user, in the following syntax
runas /user domain\username "full path to exe"

ie.
runas /user domain\username "c:\temp\temp.exe /a /l /r"

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Active Directory MMCs and Command Line Tools

Administration Tools on your Windows XP/7:
If you need to manage/export data from AD outside of your windows server, install:
- the "Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack" (for windows 2003 AD servers)
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=16770

OR

- the "Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7" (for windows 2008 AD servers)
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=7887

They provide Active Directory related MMCs and Directory Services command line tools.

Quickly Exporting AD Information
Dsquery.exe allows you to find any users/groups/OUs/computers etc based on their name/attributes
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732952(WS.10).aspx

Examples:
To retrieve all AD Groups with the prefix "foo"
dsquery group -name foo*

To retrieve all the users in the container "Users", domain "microsoft.com"
dsquery user cn=users,dc=microsoft,dc=com

Other AD Command Line Tools
Microsoft has also allowed you to perform most basic AD operations such as adding users/groups, resetting passwords, deleting accounts/groups via the command-line tools
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322684

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Execute Large SQL files

sqlcmd -d [DatabaseName] -S [ServerName] -i [sql script file] -o [output file]

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Mobile Development Resources

Flex Resources
The following Flex ebooks are not too hard to find on the www:
  • Flex in a week 4.5
  • Adobe Flex 4.5 Fundamentals: Training from the Source
  • Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4 Bible
  • Enterprise Development with Flex (Adobe Dev Lib) 2010

Why MonoTouch And Mono For Android

Visual Studio Themes - Dark Background

If you are using a mild VS theme which has a grey background and light brown text:

you may have problems with some html tags having the same color as its text.  You need to change the "default" color 0x020000000 to your desired color.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangingYourColorsInVisualStudioNETBlackVersusWhite.aspx

The standard options to look out for are options-fonts->

  • Razor
  • Plain Text
  • Line Numbers
  • Comments
  • Identifier
  • Keyword
  • Operator
  • String
  • UserTypes

Removing Empty Folders In Command Prompt

For a quick way to batch remove all empty folders, "cd" into that folder and perform the following:

for /f "usebackq delims=" %d in (`"dir /ad/b/s | sort /R"`) do rd "%d"

Please backup the source folder before doing so, just in case.  Afterwards, you can use beyond compare and order by folder size to compare the results.