Monthly Archives: September 2008

Open the network connections in WS2008/Vista in a snap!

I’ve been frustrated like many with all the massive and not really making sense UI changes that Microsoft have made to Vista and then WS2008… I really don’t care that much about Vista, but servers are a little more critical than workstations, and we need to get to things quickly!

So to get to the network connections in XP or WS2003 you could easily open it from either the icon in the tray or from network connections etc. In WS2008 and Vista you have navigate through multiple windows to get to it.. or you can do this!

Click Start and type ncpa.cpl and press enter
You are now presented with the Network connections area!

I Recently had a non-responsive Exchange server and given that I could not logon to the server via console or RDP and the services were not responding correctly from a remote machine, I turned to using the built-in Shutdown command that comes with WS2003.

However this tool didn’t seem to work, even with my test server, and then I remembered about the Sysinternals suit of tools and specifically PSShutdown.exe.
But even with this utility I had trouble, although in the end I managed to get it to work and gracefully restart the Exchange server.

Here is the command syntax that I used and which worked:
psshutdown \computername -r -u administrator
It will then prompt for a password and away it goes!

Download the Sysinternals Suite from here:

How to install and how to configure SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938245

Certain MS products have not been updated to work with WS 2008.. great work Microsoft!!
This KB will at least help with SQL 2005 Reporting services which is required for products such as SCE 2007 and DPM 2007.