Windows Tips & Tricks UPDATE--April 11, 2005

Windows Tips &amp Tricks UPDATE, April 11, 2005, —brought to you by the Windows IT Pro Network and the Windows 2000 FAQ site
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FAQs

Q. Which Microsoft services and products support clustering?
Q. Do I need to take any special steps when restoring a backup of my Relative Identifier (RID) master?
Q. How can I trigger an action to be performed when certain Windows events occur
Q. How can I block users from accessing the Microsoft Web application service that determines unknown file extensions?
Q. Which disk counters are enabled by default in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP?

Commentary
by John Savill, FAQ Editor, [email protected]

In this issue, I tell you which Microsoft services and products support clustering and which disk counters are enabled by default in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP? I also explain the process of restoring a backup of the Relative Identifier (RID) master, how to trigger an action to be performed when certain Windows events occur, and how to block users from accessing the Microsoft Web application service that determines unknown file extensions.

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FAQs

Q Which Microsoft services and products support clustering?

A. The table at http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/images/clustertable.htm lists a number of widely used Microsoft applications and services and describes the type of clustering support they provide.

Q. Do I need to take any special steps when restoring a backup of my Relative Identifier (RID) master?

A. Remember that the RID master is responsible for allocating RIDs (in batches of 500) to all domain controllers (DCs) in a domain. If the RID master is incorrectly restored (e.g., from an old backup), it might assign RID pools that it has already issued, resulting in duplicate SIDs being created in the domain. Therefore, I recommend that you give the RID master Flexible Single-Master Operation (FSMO) role to a different DC instead of restoring the RID master. If you do restore the RID master, be aware that if you have more than one DC in the domain, the RID master must be able to contact one of them before its RID role will be started. In a disaster recovery situation, this requirement might be a problem because no other DCs would be available. Microsoft documents the steps to work around this problem at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=839879 .

Q. How can I trigger an action to be performed when certain Windows events occur?

A. Solutions such as Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) have highly configurable options for performing actions that depend on Windows events. However, Windows XP and later provide a tool, eventtriggers.exe, which lets you schedule an action to be performed when certain events occur. The basic command syntax for creating a trigger is

  eventtriggers /create /tr "<friendly name for trigger >"  /eid <event ID to trigger on>  /l <log to monitor, or omit to track all logs>  /t <type of event to monitor for, e.g., ERROR>  /tk <task to perform when event is found>  /ru <username to run the action under; by default, the local system is used>  /rp <password of specified user account>

To display a detailed list of the triggers you've created, run the command

  eventtriggers /query /v

You can configure the query to create the output in a specific format. For example, to create a comma-separated value (CSV) format, add the argument

  /fo csv

to the end of the previous command (/fo means format). Other format options include table and list. If you need to troubleshoot a trigger action, you can view the log file at \%systemroot%\system32\wbem\logs\cmdtriggerconsumer.log.

However, the log doesn't give much information. Typically, the best way to debug a trigger action is to try to run the trigger action manually. Remember that specifying credentials (i.e., the /ru and /rp arguments) to use might fix the problem because by default the action will run under the local system context. To remove all the triggers on your system, use this command:

  eventtriggers /delete /tid *

Q. How can I block users from accessing the Microsoft Web application service that determines unknown file extensions?

A. By default, if you try to open a file that has an unknown file extension, you'll be given the option of selecting a program with which to open the file or using the Microsoft Web service to help ascertain the required application to open the file type, as the figure at http://www.windowsitpro.com/articles/images/unknownextensionblock.gif shows. To block the Web lookup of extensions, perform these steps:

Start the registry editor (regedit.exe).
Go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system registry subkey.
From the Edit menu, select New, DWORD Value.
Enter a value name of NoInternetOpenWith and press Enter.
Double-click the new value and set it to 1. Click OK.
Close the registry editor.

The change takes effect immediately, and the user now sees only the dialog box for choosing the application to use; the option to connect to the Web service is gone.

Q. Which disk counters are enabled by default in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP?

A. In earlier versions of Windows, you had to manually enable certain physical and logical disk counters before their values could be monitored via tools such as performance monitor. In Windows 2003 and XP, both sets of counters are automatically enabled, and no manual configuration is required. Microsoft notes that for legacy applications that use the IOCTL_DISK_PERFORMANCE control code to retrieve raw counters, you can specify -Y or -N on the Diskperf command to forcibly respectively enable or disable the counters, as you could with previous versions of Windows.

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