fsutil in Windows: volume, file and sparse file operations
Most administrators meet fsutil exactly once, in a forum answer that says to run fsutil hardlink list or fsutil dirty query, and…
Guides and articles
Practical guides for system administrators - Windows, PowerShell, Active Directory, networking, and infrastructure.
Get-VM inventory reporting in PowerCLI: complete, accurate and fast
Get-VM is the first PowerCLI cmdlet everyone learns and the one most inventory reports are built on. Piping it into Select-Object and…
esxcli on ESXi: syntax, output formatters and remote execution
esxcli is the primary command set on an ESXi host. Almost every configuration and diagnostic action that has a command-line form lives…
powercfg on Windows: power plans, sleep diagnostics and battery reports
powercfg.exe is the command-line front end for the Windows power subsystem. It reads and writes power plans, reports which sleep states the…
Test-NetConnection in Windows: the PowerShell replacement for ping, telnet and tracert
Test-NetConnection is the built-in PowerShell cmdlet that answers the three questions a sysadmin asks when something on the network stops working: can…
net use in Windows: mapped drives, credentials and error 1219
net use maps a network share to a drive letter, lists what is already mapped, and disconnects it again. That part takes…
chkdsk in Windows: what each switch does, and when not to run it
Most of what administrators know about chkdsk was true in 2005. Run it with /f /r, reboot, watch a progress percentage for…
takeown in Windows: take ownership of files and folders safely
Administrator rights do not grant access to a file. They grant the ability to take ownership of it, and ownership is what…
klist in Windows: read and clear the Kerberos ticket cache
Kerberos fails quietly. When a ticket cannot be issued, Windows falls back to NTLM or simply returns access denied, and nothing on…
schtasks in Windows: create, query and audit scheduled tasks from CMD
schtasks is the command line interface to the Windows Task Scheduler. It creates, queries, runs, stops and deletes scheduled tasks, on the…