These are a few of my favorite things... (Part 2)
sl.exe
It’s just like portqry but with some things that make it beneficial for scripts… Much faster, multiple ports input and output via file.
My syntax would be something like this for checking the ports for multiple DCs...
sl.exe -f ips.txt -jops -t 88,389,3268,445
Procmon
It's like filemon, procmon, and regmon all rolled up in one and on steroids... Here I filter my process for just route.exe. This is very useful if an app is returning an error and you want to see where that error is being generated from.
notepad2.exe
You know notepad is nice but notepad2 is just so much nicer so I replace it. If you can't afford primalscript or some other editor this is definitely the way to go. Too many features to mention here but one I really like is the ability to select columns of data easily by holding down the alt key, then you can cut, copy or whatever, that was always one of my major complaints with notepad.
dsquery
Saw a question this week on how to find all the stale computer accounts in the directory and easily clean them up. Reminded me of all the nice built in AD tools like dsquery, dsmod, dsrm, etc.
To find all the computers that have been inactive for 12 weeks you'd run this:
dsquery computer -inactive 12
Simple as that, then you can use DSRM.exe to delete them.
Cipher
I recently ran into an issue where printer drivers would not install and I couldn't figure out why, turns out that some of the print dlls were encrypted. So what is the easiest way to decrypt everything under c:\windows?
cipher /d /s:c:\Windows
Of course there are other uses for this tool but this is a handy trick to make sure there are no system files encrypted.