Some stupid ¤#?# at Microsoft has seen fit to change the parameter to Mstsc (Remote Desktop) in SP1 (Vista/Win 2008) and SP3 (XP). Before you typed “Mstsc /Console” to connect to the console session at a server (basically some not so well written applications only worked here), but that was then – now say hello to “Mstsc /Admin”… Even more genius, the /Console is SILENTLY IGNORED…  just so it will take you longer to figure out what is wrong, AND of cause all third party Terminal Services applications will no longer be able to connect to console. Yes I know, of cause new versions will be released…  but what #¤”% would have been wrong with leaving the /Console for backwards compatibility. And why, well because Windows 2008 no longer needs this (yeah we heard this one before ;-)), ok cool – but hey Windows 2003 still does and will be around for QUITE some time still (we still have one or two NT4 servers running).. Sorry no price for that one guys. Details click here

xps_wizard.png
You may have heard about the excellent utility TrueCrypt which create encrypted virtual drives or partitions!?  But now it has been released in a version 5.0a which should support the underlying OS (that is transparent bootup encryption of the system drive).  Excellent..  I have not had time to check it, but if it works its utterly excellent (and best of all FREEEEEEEEEE!).

Recovery is as I read it achieved via an ISO boot image created upon installation, but again I have not checked this.

Need to administer a remotely located server that has not enabled remote desktop!?  Sure you can make a GP or do some registry editing, but hey it all takes time, some nice guy has made a util that will deal with this for you, just point and click..

http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/06/remotely-enable-remote-desktop.html

 remotedesktopenablerscreenshot.jpg