Test-NetConnection is the built-in PowerShell cmdlet that answers the three questions a sysadmin asks when something on the network stops working: can I reach the host at all, is the TCP port actually open, and which path does the traffic…
net use maps a network share to a drive letter, lists what is already mapped, and disconnects it again. That part takes thirty seconds to learn. What takes years to learn is why the drive works for you and not…
Most of what administrators know about chkdsk was true in 2005. Run it with /f /r, reboot, watch a progress percentage for four hours, hope. On a modern NTFS volume that ritual is usually the wrong move, and on a…
Administrator rights do not grant access to a file. They grant the ability to take ownership of it, and ownership is what lets you rewrite the permissions. That distinction is the whole reason takeown exists, and it is why “I…
Kerberos fails quietly. When a ticket cannot be issued, Windows falls back to NTLM or simply returns access denied, and nothing on screen mentions Kerberos at all. klist is the one built-in tool that shows what the machine actually holds…
schtasks is the command line interface to the Windows Task Scheduler. It creates, queries, runs, stops and deletes scheduled tasks, on the local machine or on a remote one, without opening the console. Everything the GUI can do, it can…
w32tm is the command line front end to the Windows Time service. It reports where a machine gets its time, how far off it is, and whether the last synchronisation actually worked. On a standalone PC none of that matters…
repadmin is the tool that answers one question no GUI answers quickly: is every domain controller in this forest actually receiving the changes the others make? It reads replication metadata straight from AD DS, so it reports what the directory…
How to use sc.exe to query, configure and control Windows services from the command line: start types, recovery actions, dependencies and remote servers.
Resolve a PID to a real process with tasklist, filter by service, session or memory, and end it cleanly with taskkill - including process trees and remote hosts.
