How to get RDP access again with multiple sessions on a machine

How to get RDP access again with multiple sessions on a machine

You may run into this scenario from time to time:

I am unable to RDP or TS into a server remotely because 2 people are logged in and the console port is in use.

Let’s just say that the people or person occuping the maximum number of allowed connections(including console) is new and doesn’t realize that they need to actually disconnect the session and not just click the ‘x’. So you are an admin too but you can’t RDP in. Here is an alternative method:

1. Locate a machine that is running the same OS. In this case it was WIN2K8. You can obtain a remote prompt on that machine by using psexec.exe from:
   

   http://www.hpdit.com/sysinternals/psexec.exe

   Then you will want to query the terminal server of the machine you are not able to RDP into. (Discussed later)

2. Copy the binary by clicking into it and saving locally to a place where you can find and execute it easily from the command line.
3. Press Windows key and R and then type in cmd and press enter.
4. CD to the directory you saved the psexec.exe binary and run the following command:psexec -u domain\admin_creds \\servername cmd

   *Note you can always verify you have a remote command line prompt by checking the hostname as follows:

   hostname

   Press enter and it will produce the system’s hostname

5. Press enter and type in the password of the user with the admin creds and press enter.
6. Then do a query of terminal sessions by doing the following:query session /server:servername
7. Look for the sessions to pop up and find the desireable one to end.
8. End it by typing in the following:reset session [ID] /server:servername
9. You can re-run that query again to determine that the session has been disconnected.
10. Exit out of that prompt by typing exit and then pressing enter.
11. Launch an RDP session ie.

mstsc /v:servername

A connection.

Virtual IT Consulting the right way

The majority of IT Consulting companies make their effectiveness as Consultants of little to no avail.  Why? You may ask.  Because these Owners often digress and focus on technologies and play with it… and view their clients as a distant lower priority.  However, if you get this part of “IT” wrong, you will doom your IT consulting company to “clueless geek” status. It’s crucial that you understand one extremely important principle here: Recruiting and retaining clients is tantamount to your growth, confidence and stability as a company. Keeping up with the latest and greatest IT should never take a priority over your IT consulting company’s mission objectives!

In other words, don’t get side-tracked with the newest mobile devices running as a front end to a cloud back end, the new open source OS or applications.   Become a hunter and capture the business opportunities surrounding how you solve your customer’s biggest business problems with your recommended IT solutions. The real mission of IT consulting company is capturing business, retaining and generating new business.
How is this done?

You can do this by offering cloud solutions.  Leverage automated solutions.  Think Smart, Act Smart, be Smart as they always said in the Navy to me.
To put this all in perspective with your computer consulting company, you need to understand and embrace the concept of virtual IT consulting.
Virtual IT  or VIT is what allows your IT consulting company to function as an extension of your clients. Your computer consulting company essentially becomes the outsourced IT department for your clients.  This becomes a Win-Win, for example your clients can get real cutting-edge Fortune 500 IT consulting along with making their budgets go further in meeting their day to day objectives.
As owner or manager of an IT consulting company in this role, you will most likely become the CIO (chief information officer), CTO (chief technology officer), IT manager or entire IT Department business clients.  And just like any well-rounded internal IT department, your virtual IT consulting business will need to provide, , a complete nuts and bolts up to CTO  solution that includes services like help desk, desktop support, network administration, web design, SEO, IT engineering, security, training, procurement, and asset management… because anything short of the complete virtual IT solution will leave consulting money on the table.
The Bottom Line

Most IT consulting companies are making a huge mistake when it comes to their small business endeavors… because these IT consulting company owners get too focused on the technology, at the expense of the business opportunities. In order for your IT consulting company to prosper, make sure that you understand the concept of virtual IT and build virtual IT into every major business decision for your IT consulting company has before its helm. To continue learning more about how you can use virtual IT to grow your computer consulting company, pay us a visit and fill out the Contact Us form, for the network assessment and 1 hour free IT Consulting to your Business.  Visit us at http://www.hpdit.com

What makes an effective IT Management Team?

IT Managers and Decision Makers, this was written for you.

IT Departments come in all different shapes and sizes. There are however some key elements I would recommend for effective IT management. It’s important to certainly have strategy.

Here is my list:

Asset Management and Risk Assessment

Time and time again you will need to know what your on hand IT Assets are and associated Risks to those assets. This is important and empowering knowledge to have to make recommendations or make decisions that can help add money back into budget. Its always good to know how much time is left on your IT assets and when to retire them as well as getting the most you can in return for the sale of used equipment. Understanding Risk is important so as to ensure your assets will be best protected and your interests are best met. So there are different formulas for determining this, what’s important is that you have established due diligence toward this area to protect your business from significant liabilities.

Change Control

With technology advancing every moment, it is very important to limit risk when implementing changes to your infrastructure and technology. It’s always good to have management on the same page when you are driving change. Also communication to employees is key to increasing change awareness. There are many aspects of change control, what is most important with regards to change is planning and communication. If you fail to plan you are planning to fail. And failure to communicate is a structural breakdown which will only drive distraction, confusion, and inefficiency.

Active measures to reduce costs by going Green

Being Green is a buzz phrase we have been hearing a lot about. What does it really mean to be Green? In my view it means just being more efficient. Does that mean working your employees to the bone with multi-tasking? No, absolutely not. You have the potential with building a Green working environment to motivate your employees without the pay raises per-se, ie. a dollar saved is a dollar earned. With technology today this is very much possible from the front line all the way back up to the top. There are a lot of ways to be Green and we certainly can help you do that, with the problems in today’s economy it is essential to save money in order to stay in business while maintaining your competitive edge.

Release Readiness

Release Readiness is very important in the Change Control and Project Management aspects. With there being a lot of change in technology its important to be ready to effectively implement those changes. They can be hardware or software. Its important to be proactive and provide due diligence in technology management, as the very efficiency you seek through it will simply go backward with immature or incorrect technology implementations.

IT Security

As more and more companies go virtual, and data is their value. It is important then that assets, availability, reliability, and performance all be examines and protected. Threats can come from many different directions. It is important to understand the threats and risks and take action to protect against them. So there are many different types of measures to be taken when building a Security Baseline. I listed this step later on because obtaining a full understanding of your IT Assets is key along with doing a Risk Assessment. These two elements will help management understand what security measures need to be taken. You are only as strong as your weakest link, also keep in mind your business is as valuable to you as your desire to stay in business. There is a great deal of cyberfraud and startups that literally steal from their competitors. If you value staying in business you simply cannot ignore IT Security and pure and proper implementation practices. Saving money in a foolish manner can put you more at risk. But doing things smarter will save you money. As long as there are cyber criminals there will always be a need for cyber security.

Effective Communications

Each of these are important as they develop well rounded focus as we tackle the most complicated and diverse IT issues. It’s important to run a tight ship that collectively bears a scalable setup, and adaptable setup. In my personal view innovative managers and decision makers can utilize effectively their abilities to keep their employees motivated while adding to bottom dollar.

Let me know how you do, with giving your focus to these principles.

Efficiency through Technology and Quality by HPD Global SaaS Solutions

These days it is most important to take the business battle to strategic design. Some concerns with the Economy as it is are to find cheaper ways to increase efficiency without hurting quality. Technology is one strong avenue to do that through. Some careful attention should be given by management into various areas surrounding this. Consider the following:

What areas of your work flow can be automated?
How utilized is your present technology?
Have you considered efficiency through leverage of technology?
Could you double your output with quality by doing things different?

These questions help us better determine as management what areas we should push to resolution on a more level approach. I am going to make a bold statement about our present economic situation. I believe that the businesses the utilize creativity, strategic design, and technology toward doing things smarter (different) will be the companies that take us further into the new millenium and will be tomorrow’s successful companies. You have heard that the best way to win is thinking outside the box. Technology when implemented successfully with intelligent engineers will not only yield success but a peace of mind. You will want to ensure that you deal with solid Technology Experts when making these changes. To an extent it will involve vision and entrepreneurship, but it can be done. So this will be an area that all technology management will face if they have not faced it so far. It is the dynamics of where Global Business is going, you just have to think outside the box and be the first to the fight. HPD Global has multiple SaaS solutions you should contact us to save money.

Using Ubuntu Server as a Desktop and Cost Savings

Cost Savings and Technology advantages of Ubuntu Server

Most of you are familiar with GPL/GNU Open Source Software. I wanted to recommend a highly stable and cheap to free open source server. Ubuntu meaning ethic or humanist philosophy focusing on people’s allegiances and relations with each other. The meaning behind the them is something quite intrinsic to the creation of the technology. In a humanity sense open source software allows individuals, groups, or entire communities to contribute in some way to the development of the software. The overall output of the product is of higher quality, testing, and also more in line with what the user wants.

Since Ubuntu open source you have the option to change it. So yes this is Linux. I wanted to state however that Ubuntu is the most supported version of Linux out there, and that you can do anything with it as you would a Windows Server. You have have the option to turn it into a desktop with a simple command line entry such as this:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

The wonderful thing about open source is you feel or get empowered through the transparency of what you observe. Also how you can customize and change things to better suit the needs of your IT department or Organization. So now on to the advantages. Ubuntu is a light weight server out of the box, or you can make it more robust. It can easily be converted into any type of back end server ie: File, Web, Email, Media, Authentication, Proxy, Code Repository, Load Balancing. Just about anything you want it can be turned into that. So let me point you to the documentation for reference so you will be able to observe and learn or consider the cost savings you can benefit from.

Ubuntu Home Page

At HPD Global – VIT Cloud Services we run Ubuntu and several other open source solutions on top of traditional Microsoft Windows Server. We feel this brings greater value to our customers as they have the option to tailor the technologies we offer to better suit their needs. Contact us today for more IT Profitability.

Multiple Desktops in Windows

( Linux / *nix ) feel in Windows

Making Windows feel like an open source environment

There’s a cool app that helps you multi-task in an organized and efficient way in windows.  If you have used Freebsd, Suse, Slackware, DSL, Fedora, RHEL, etc.  They all have a few things different that Windows does not have, that is that they allow you to have multiple desktops.  Now that is a good idea that allows efficient work to be done in each desktop.  It helps to be able to track what you are triaging or working on.  Here is a program that gives windows that functionality as well:
https://www.hpdit.com/sysinternals/Desktops.exe
Pretty cool…

Removing Artio . cz and / or Kanga Internet . com meta tags / link from your Joomla pages

The Issue:  A spammer places their Website links in all your page’s metadata
The problem with Joomsef is that although it is great it has a down side SEO. The standard Joomsef component has advertising used in it and this is produced in the form of the Meta Generator tag in the pages displayed. This can affect website ranking in search engines. It also bloats the meta tag information with no relational ad content. There can also be output at the bottom of the pages that have a link to the Joomsef website, in my case Kanga Internet.
The Joomsef 1.5.1 version still has a file called signature.b64 included with it. This file is checked in every call or click on the website links. The signature file is a base 64 encoded string that, when decoded, contains the a HTML link to Artio. Simply removing the base 64 file will not work and removing the mention of the base 64 file from within the calling PHP code will not work so I have modified the code to not even look for the file and removed all checking for it. The code is quicker as it doesnt do a all the processing, decoding, placement, checking and the display of the advert that would normally happen on every click.

After locating the file signature.b64 open it for edit.  You will want to copy the entire text string then commence decoding of Base 64.  It should look something like this:

PGJyIC8+PHNwYW4+PGEgaHJlZj1cImh0dHA6Ly93d3cua

2FuZ2FpbnRlcm5ldC5jb21cIiB0aXRsZT1$

There are many Base 64 decoders online as well as downloadable programs+source code.  Use one of them to decode the string and you will see it reveals clearly what these spammers seek to spam your pages with:

Now like some of you I am sure you went and installed KangaInternet’s solution under misleading pretences from KangaInternet.bomb (hopefully) that they were providing us a wonderful service by riding the software of Artio.cz’s spam, well not only did they do that, but well like Gollum’s love for the ring they also could not put down the spamming and well in my case they opted to put their own website link, which really upset a lot of web masters developers including myself.  I don’t know about you, but no one likes to be mislead into thinking someone is giving the community back a solution only to find out that they have been tricked into having a very similar spam problem from in this case kangainternet.  Plus, Kanga internet didn’t write the code, Artio did, also what relational content does Kanga Internet provide to my website, so yes having these foolish tags in your pages will simple hurt your ranking in Google and boost some dumb chap’s shoddy company, I would call these acts grayhat SEO, some might say blackhat.  Anyways what a relief it is to not have that junk in my pages.

Generate your own 4096 Bit Encryption Keypair for Security

Let say you want to raise the level of encryption when you SSH to your linux box, you may feel that 1024 bit encryption isn’t working out very well for you. 

Here’s a fast and simple tool to use: 

It’s called puttygen.exe can be found at:

www.putty.nl

You won’t have to worry about doing this via the command line.  High security generation made easy.

Great Tool for Windows Server Active Directory Exploration

SaaS: Software as a Service

Thanks to the internet, high speed connectivity, and rapid development of applications over the internet, we have the birth of Virtual IT – Cloud Services.  Imagine if you will the ability to have your IT Department totally running from the cloud for a flat rate?  Its happening.  A lot of services can be provided through SaaS (Software as a Service) via the Internet, these being:

1. Backups
2. Security Baseline
3. PC Optimization
4. Malware removal
5. Remote Desktop Troubleshooting
6. Analysis
7. Web Development
8. Internet Marketing SEO/SEM
9. Programming
10. Patching

Most of your Help Desk, IT Administration, and whole IT Department functions can be outsourced with high ROI.

Would you like to outsource your IT to a well reputable 100% usa firm?  We are making that happen for many.