Very small announcement – just to let you know, my favorite password manager LastPass just released closed beta version that supports not only web pages, but also applications!

Very, very cool – I am betatesting at this moment and will let you know once it is released publicly. This was the only major feature I was still waiting for.

Martin

If you ask regular administrator that got experiences with scripting about his favorite scripting utilities that he is using even in combination with PowerShell today, I guess that many people will reply "Robocopy and PsTools of course". I am one of them – even though I don’t use pstools anymore, robocopy /MIR is one command whose equivalent is simply missing in Powershell.

There are few different versions of Robocopy though:
1.) XP010 – version from Resource Kit that is being used by most administrators
2.) XP026 – updated version, however it’s not easy to get it
3.) XP027 – new version built-into Windows Vista
4.) XP027 – new version built-into Windows 7

Have you noticed something strange? Points 3 and 4 are the same, so why are they mentioned?

Even though version number is the same, Windows 7 version of Robocopy contains some improvements – /MT parameter. Default value is 8, maximum allowed is 128.

With /MT, you can specify how many threads will robocopy use to copy files. I was really curious about these results, so I decided to give it a try and test how different versions of Robocopy compares. For each test I decided to do combination of following variables: files count, files size and number of threads.

First, let’s compare versions 10, 26 and 27. On horizontal, you can see amount of files (100, 1000 and 3000). Lower number is better (amount of time needed to copy those files).

As you can see, new version of robocopy was faster in most cases (expect copying 3000 x 1MB files).

Increase of speed is caused by multiple threads running – this is especially useful if you copy multiple small files.

Ok, so we have 8 threads now, does that mean that if I will increase them to 128, it will be fastest? Of course not Below you can find few graphs that I just run today – every line here represents different number of threads (8, 15 and 40):

As you can see, performance is not very stable and different combination of factors sometimes favors more and sometimes less threads. Therefore my recommendation – don’t mess with threads (unless you got static jobs that you run over and over) and simply enjoy the fact that it is faster

Suddenly, one scenario that could really benefit from multi-threading is not supported yet In robocopy, if file is locked and cannot be overwritten, robocopy will retry it over and over – by default 1.000.000 times with delay of 30 seconds between those retries. You would expect that in case of multi-threaded copy one thread will try it over and over and the rest would simply continue, however whole robocopy will hang. It would be nice to have additional switch to support this mode.

It’s also important to mention disadvantages\bugs of all versions of robocopy:

XP010 – too old There are some bugs related to mirroring security settings for example and of course performance was greatly improved in recent versions.
XP026 – NO ERRORLEVEL. There is bug in this version that doesn’t return correct errorlevels (it’s always 0). Not fixed as far as I know.
XP027 – runs only at Windows Vista. You cannot copy it over to XP\2003 server and use it there anymore
XP027 (Win7) – runs ONLY at Windows 7 – even if you try to copy it over to Windows Vista machine, it won’t help you at all (I will talk about this in detail in upcoming Win7 Inside Out article).

Don’t forget that graphs included in this post are just informative – I didn’t rerun them few times over and over, I just wanted to get quick idea how different is performance between versions.

Martin Zugec

Maybe you attended my two presentations about cloud computing – first part was about “private” cloud (Live Mesh, SkyDrive, profiles stored on Internet, Ketarin…), second was about “business” cloud.

To summarize it, talking about private cloud, I don’t believe in “everything must go to web” scenarios, but I rather prefer hybrid cloud solutions – accessing online documents from your locally installed applications or using centrally stored configuration for your applications.

For business clouds, I again prefer hybrid solutions – even though I believe that small companies could already use virtual machine hosted on internet (like GoGrid of FlexiScale).

Core component of my private cloud is Live Mesh, but I was seeking for some time to alternative. My biggest complains are the fact that you cannot script Live Mesh and the fact that you cannot create special rules to handle conflicts (and for some folders, I got conflicts every few minutes). I was looking for alternative for some time, however I was not very successful.

Yesterday I installed again Gladinet – Gladinet approach is little bit different than other providers and I like that idea. Instead of building huge infrastructure, they simply provide “wrappers” around existing cloud storages.

If I should describe it to someone that doesn’t have any knowledge about cloud computing or storage, I would describe it as follows:

Gladinet allows you to map your internet-based storages as local folders

Gladinet drive

Among the list of supported storage providers you can find Google, Microsoft (both Azure and SkyDrive) or Amazon (S3).

List of supported providers is pretty impressive

Access your SkyDrive as regular drive

What I find as disadvantages? First of all, some people (Michal “Altair” Valasek) complained about the fact that it is not fully reliable – sometimes files doesn’t display correctly or they are not uploaded – I cannot confirm this (yet) however.

Second complain I got is about the fact that these folders doesn’t support symbolic links – error message returned by mklink is “The device does not support symbolic links.”  If this drive could support symbolic links, it would be much more useful and automated backup and integration with your local computer would be much better.

Third complain is about “Task manager”. Whatever you do (upload\delete…) will be queued to task manager and processed on background, which makes complete sense. I was however not able to find any option to disable automatic popup of task manager whenever you do something.

Task manager will popup whenever you perform any operation with mounted drive.

Just small hint, in case you would like to access Gladinet drive from elevated prompt. Your drive is mounted from \\127.0.0.1\Resources, so to remap it under elevated prompt, simply run Net Use X: \\127.0.0.1\Resources

Martin Zugec

I just came across this tool that allows you to explore your SkyDrive from the Windows Explorer. Very nice!

Make sure your read the FAQ before playing around with it.

Subversion 1.6.6 was released on 21-Oct-2009. It is a maintenance release containing the latest bugfixes to the 1.6.x line. See official release announcement

(Subversion (shortened form: svn) is a highly popular open source version control system for software developers. If you want to learn more about svn read the subversion book. A popular svn client for Windows is TortoiseSVN.)

With this article I want to share my user defined language file for the popular Notepad++ editor. It is for both, PowerShell 1.0 and 2.0, and it uses the same colors like the PowerGUI Script Editor.

Installing a user defined language file for Notepad++ that someone else has written is pretty simple as long as you haven’t installed any previously: save the file as userDefineLang.xml in your %APPDATA%\Notepad++\ directory.

If you’ve added other user defined languages, you need to merge the two XML files. That’s pretty bad on the user experience side, but if you’re the kind of person who needs two user defined languages, you’re a total geek who loves merging XML files anyways

<NotepadPlus>
    <UserLang name="PowerShell" ext="ps1">
        <Settings>
            <Global caseIgnored="yes" />
            <TreatAsSymbol comment="yes" commentLine="yes" />
            <Prefix words1="no" words2="no" words3="no" words4="yes" />
        </Settings>
        <KeywordLists>
            <Keywords name="Delimiters">&quot;&apos;0&quot;&apos;0</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Folder+">{ (</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Folder-">} )</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Operators">% * / + &lt; = &gt;</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Comment"> 1&lt;# 2#&gt; 0#</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Words1">Add-Computer Add-Content Add-History Add-Member Add-PSSnapin Add-Type Checkpoint-Computer Clear-Content Clear-EventLog Clear-History Clear-Item Clear-ItemProperty Clear-Variable Compare-Object Complete-Transaction Connect-WSMan ConvertFrom-Csv ConvertFrom-SecureString ConvertFrom-StringData Convert-Path ConvertTo-Csv ConvertTo-Html ConvertTo-SecureString ConvertTo-Xml Copy-Item Copy-ItemProperty Debug-Process Disable-ComputerRestore Disable-PSBreakpoint Disable-PSSessionConfiguration Disable-WSManCredSSP Disconnect-WSMan Enable-ComputerRestore Enable-PSBreakpoint Enable-PSRemoting Enable-PSSessionConfiguration Enable-WSManCredSSP Enter-PSSession Exit-PSSession Export-Alias Export-Clixml Export-Console Export-Counter Export-Csv Export-FormatData Export-ModuleMember Export-PSSession ForEach-Object Format-Custom Format-List Format-Table Format-Wide Get-Acl Get-Alias Get-AuthenticodeSignature Get-ChildItem Get-Command Get-ComputerRestorePoint Get-Content Get-Counter Get-Credential Get-Culture Get-Date Get-Event Get-EventLog Get-EventSubscriber Get-ExecutionPolicy Get-FormatData Get-Help Get-History Get-Host Get-HotFix Get-Item Get-ItemProperty Get-Job Get-Location Get-Member Get-Module Get-PfxCertificate Get-Process Get-PSBreakpoint Get-PSCallStack Get-PSDrive Get-PSProvider Get-PSSession Get-PSSessionConfiguration Get-PSSnapin Get-Random Get-Service Get-TraceSource Get-Transaction Get-UICulture Get-Unique Get-Variable Get-WinEvent Get-WmiObject Get-WSManCredSSP Get-WSManInstance Group-Object Import-Alias Import-Clixml Import-Counter Import-Csv Import-LocalizedData Import-Module Import-PSSession Invoke-Command Invoke-Expression Invoke-History Invoke-Item Invoke-WmiMethod Invoke-WSManAction Join-Path Limit-EventLog Measure-Command Measure-Object Move-Item Move-ItemProperty New-Alias New-Event New-EventLog New-Item New-ItemProperty New-Module New-ModuleManifest New-Object New-PSDrive New-PSSession New-PSSessionOption New-Service New-TimeSpan New-Variable New-WebServiceProxy New-WSManInstance New-WSManSessionOption Out-Default Out-File Out-GridView Out-Host Out-Null Out-Printer Out-String Pop-Location Push-Location Read-Host Receive-Job Register-EngineEvent Register-ObjectEvent Register-PSSessionConfiguration Register-WmiEvent Remove-Computer Remove-Event Remove-EventLog Remove-Item Remove-ItemProperty Remove-Job Remove-Module Remove-PSBreakpoint Remove-PSDrive Remove-PSSession Remove-PSSnapin Remove-Variable Remove-WmiObject Remove-WSManInstance Rename-Item Rename-ItemProperty Reset-ComputerMachinePassword Resolve-Path Restart-Computer Restart-Service Restore-Computer Resume-Service Select-Object Select-String Select-Xml Send-MailMessage Set-Acl Set-Alias Set-AuthenticodeSignature Set-Content Set-Date Set-ExecutionPolicy Set-Item Set-ItemProperty Set-Location Set-PSBreakpoint Set-PSDebug Set-PSSessionConfiguration Set-Service Set-StrictMode Set-TraceSource Set-Variable Set-WmiInstance Set-WSManInstance Set-WSManQuickConfig Show-EventLog Sort-Object Split-Path Start-Job Start-Process Start-Service Start-Sleep Start-Transaction Start-Transcript Stop-Computer Stop-Job Stop-Process Stop-Service Stop-Transcript Suspend-Service Tee-Object Test-ComputerSecureChannel Test-Connection Test-ModuleManifest Test-Path Test-WSMan Trace-Command Undo-Transaction Unregister-Event Unregister-PSSessionConfiguration Update-FormatData Update-List Update-TypeData Use-Transaction Wait-Event Wait-Job Wait-Process Where-Object Write-Debug Write-Error Write-EventLog Write-Host Write-Output Write-Progress Write-Verbose Write-Warning ac asnp clc cli clp clv cpi cpp cvpa diff epal epcsv fc fl % ft fw gal gc gci gcm gdr ghy gi gl gm gp gps group gsv gsnp gu gv gwmi iex ihy ii ipal ipcsv mi mp nal ndr ni nv oh rdr ri rni rnp rp rsnp rv rvpa sal sasv sc select si sl sleep sort sp spps spsv sv tee ? write cat cd clear cp h history kill lp ls mount mv popd ps pushd pwd r rm rmdir echo cls chdir copy del dir erase move rd ren set type</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Words2">break continue do for foreach while if switch until where function filter else elseif in return exit param</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Words3">-eq -ne -ge -gt -lt -le -like -notlike -match -notmatch -replace -contains -notcontains -ieq -ine -ige -igt -ile -ilt -ilike -inotlike -imatch -inotmatch -ireplace -icontains -inotcontains -ceq -cne -cge -cgt -clt -cle -clike -cnotlike -cmatch -cnotmatch -creplace -ccontains -cnotcontains -is -isnot -as = += -= *= /= %= -and -or -band -bor</Keywords>
            <Keywords name="Words4">$</Keywords>
        </KeywordLists>
        <Styles>
            <WordsStyle name="DEFAULT" styleID="11" fgColor="000000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="FOLDEROPEN" styleID="12" fgColor="000000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="1" />
            <WordsStyle name="FOLDERCLOSE" styleID="13" fgColor="000000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="1" />
            <WordsStyle name="KEYWORD1" styleID="5" fgColor="008080" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="KEYWORD2" styleID="6" fgColor="0000FF" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="KEYWORD3" styleID="7" fgColor="FF0000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="1" />
            <WordsStyle name="KEYWORD4" styleID="8" fgColor="800080" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" fontSize="10" />
            <WordsStyle name="COMMENT" styleID="1" fgColor="008000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="COMMENT LINE" styleID="2" fgColor="008000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="NUMBER" styleID="4" fgColor="000000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="OPERATOR" styleID="10" fgColor="FF0000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="1" />
            <WordsStyle name="DELIMINER1" styleID="14" fgColor="800000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="DELIMINER2" styleID="15" fgColor="800000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
            <WordsStyle name="DELIMINER3" styleID="16" fgColor="000000" bgColor="FFFFFF" fontName="" fontStyle="0" />
        </Styles>
    </UserLang>
</NotepadPlus>

DiffMerge is an application to visually compare and merge files for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix.

Product Features:

• Diff. Graphically shows the changes between two files. Includes intra-line highlighting and full support for editing.
• Merge. Graphically shows the changes between 3 files. Allows automatic merging (when safe to do so) and full control over editing the resulting file.
• Folder Diff. Performs a side-by-side comparison of 2 folders, showing which files are only present in one file or the other, as well as file pairs which are identical or different.
• Configurable. Rulesets and options provide for customized appearance and behavior.
• International. Compatible with 42 different character encodings.
• Free. Full featured. Not a demo!

mRemote is a multi-tab, multi-protocol remote connections manager. Yes, I tried visionApp’s vRD, RoyalTS, and other’s, but mRemote is my favorite.

• mRemote is free.
• mRemote supports RDP, ICA, VNC, SSH, Telnet, RAW, Rlogin, and HTTP/S
• mRemote has a nice GUI that allows to group, categorize, and organize connections
• mRemote supports importing connections from Active Directory
• mRemote has a “Quick Connect” feature to quickly open a connection without creating an entry
• mRemote has a “Quick Search” feature to quickly find a connection while typing
• mRemote supports SCP/SFTP (SSH) file transfers
• mRemote has a built-in Screenshot manager that allows to collect multiple screenshots and save them all together or copy them to the clipboard

A few days ago, Ment van der Plas of Login Consultants released v 1.0 of his awesome App-V 4.5 Client Diagnostic and Configuration Tool, ACDC (download)

ACDC makes it possible for administrators or users to troubleshoot virtual applications on their App-V Client and the environment they run in:

• Launch predefined and custom commands within the virtual environment of each application.
• See the impact of the App-V Client and the available virtual applications on your system by calculating package size, cache size, user delta file size, log file size etc.
• Diagnose problems with App-V applications by parsing the App-V Client log file (in real time) and search any message online.
• Configure settings that are not visible in the App-V Client GUI, such as Predictive Streaming, Allow Stream from File , Max Package Age and many more.
• Give an overview of application and package information by merging important WMI, registry and OSD information in one single window.
• ACDC can be run both as an Administrator and as a Limited User. Running as a limited user will limit the functionality of the tool due to the fact that it has less permission on the system

Dennis Damen’s ReconnAct! is a tool that adds the ability to run a command (executable or script) when a user disconnects from, or reconnects to a terminal server or VDI session. Furthermore it keeps track of the client’s ip address and the client’s name.

These day, I have read in Dennis Damen’s Blog that the new version is part of the Immidio Resource Kit.