How-To Geek

If you’re experiencing slow connections or none at all to your Windows Home Server, a good way to help diagnose issues is with the Windows Home Server Toolkit. Today we take a look at the toolkit and see how it can help you get your connections back.

One of the cool features of Windows Home Server is being able to set backups of the other computers on your network to the server. Today we take a look at the process of configuring a computer on your network to be backed up automatically to WHS.

Once you have your Windows Home Server set up, you’ll want to add users and control the content they have access to. Here we take a look at how to add a new user, determine their access to shared folders, and how to disable or remove a user.

Sometimes you might find it necessary to add additional storage to your Windows Home Server. Today we’ll take a look at how to add an external hard drive to your home server to increase storage space.

Have you ever wanted to be able to access all of your important files, music, photos, and more from all computers in your home from one central server? Today we’ll take a look at Windows Home Server and show you how to install and configure it with other machines on your network.

Keeping your servers clutter-free is easy with Disk Cleanup, and scheduling a cleanup makes it effortless.

Keeping your hard drive clutter-free is essential to having a well run server. The tool to accomplish this is Disk Cleanup, but it is conspicuously missing in Server 2008… or is it?

For frequent PowerShell users, the standard settings might not be ideal. We can change the settings of our PowerShell window to how we like it by modifying the profile.

Our goal in 2010 is to get a little more in tune with our readers, and we’ve setup a new way you can send in your ideas and feedback. Also, we’ve got interesting links and details about the How-To Geek server hardware upgrades.

A hard working admin is constantly opening and closing multiple programs to get work done. When you’re working in PowerShell, we can use aliases to make switching to a new program as fast as possible.

Tired of the SCP command dropping out in the middle of a transfer, and generally being unreliable? You can use the vastly superior rsync utility that supports resuming a dropped transfer—a killer feature when you’re moving big files around.

find /path/to/files* -mtime +5 -exec rm {} ;

We’ve already shown you how to create a backup of your MySQL server from the command line, but it’s very important to know how to restore that data just in case you should need to recover from a failure. You should also make a point of testing out your recovery process on another box, just to make sure it’s working properly.

It’s very important to keep your database server backed up, and Linux makes this a trivial task from the command line. You should really put this into a cron job and run it daily (or more often), but for our purposes today, this is how to actually do the backup.

For every database, you should set the root or sa passwords to something other than the default, unless you want to get hacked. For mysql, the system administrator user is usually called root, but sometimes it’s called admin or something else.

In our previous article, we showed you the fastest way to go from a simple list of users to their creation in Active Directory. However, you’ll frequently get a list of users that will have extra data fields. Since we can’t write a script ahead of time for every possible scenario, we’ll show you how to take our user creation PowerShell script and modify it to suit your purpose.

Creating users through the AD Users and Computers snap-in is a very easy process, but you’ll frequently face the situation where you need to create accounts for a whole group of people at once. There’s no need for this to be a time consuming process for you though, and we’ve done all the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.

First, connect to the database:

Another great feature of Server 2008, is how the Delegation of Control Wizard simplifies adding rights for common tasks to groups or administrators.

There’s a quick way to do searches in Active Directory right from your start menu. We’ll show you how.

One of the first things to do in a new network is to create Users, also called User Objects. As long as you know the information about the user you need to create, the process will take no time at all.

If you’re a system administrator or power user, you may find yourself accessing Administrative Tools quite a bit. Today we show you how to access them faster by adding them to the Start Menu.

Sometimes you don’t have the time to sit in front of your monitor and click the Next button. Using an answer file to do new installs saves time, and we love saving a little time.

Installing a new Forest in Server 2008 is a breeze, mostly involving clicking the “”Next” button a lot. We’ll show you how.

The Shutdown Event Tracker is a great tool for enterprise admins to keep track of server shutdowns. There’s been more than one experience where we’ve been troubleshooting a downed server, and it would have been extremely useful to know what was going through the mind of the person who shut it off. But if you are not running an enterprise, or you just find it more annoying that useful, here’s how to shut it off.