In the Toolbox-Sysinternals
- Admin
- Jun 13, 2017
- 2 min read
Sysinternals is a suite of awesome tools free for use. I admit, I've only used a small fraction of the available applications but what I do use, I find indispensable.
How-To-Geek has a series of trainings on how to use some of the tools, you can find that information on the link below:
This is a great tool to have in your Tech Toolbox. Previously you had to download the suite, but now Microsoft offers Sysinternals Live.
The information below was taken directly from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545021.aspx:
"Sysinternals Live is a service that enables you to execute Sysinternals tools directly from the Web without hunting for and manually downloading them. Simply enter a tool's Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as https://live.sysinternals.com/<toolname> or \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname>.
You can view the entire Sysinternals Live tools directory in a browser at https://live.sysinternals.com."
My very favorite tool to use is psexec, and my favorite, least complicated task to run is a gpupdate.
We have mostly mobile machines in our environment and catching those machines on-network can be difficult, to say the least. With Powershell there are a lot of options for management as well, but sometimes keeping it simple is the order of the day. When I need a quick dump of machines on the network, I can export a list from DHCP into a file, then run PSEXEC on that list in a very short order. When we've made a change to group policy that needs to be immediately updated on our machines, for example, I would run one or both of the commands below to force those updates. If I only wanted to update the computer policy I would run the first, if I wanted to run it only on the user policy I would run the second. You can also just run gpupdate.exe with no target to update both.
Psexec.exe @filename.txt Gpupdate.exe /Target:Computer /Force
Psexec.exe @filename.txt Gpupdate.exe /Target:User /Force
As you may have noted, I did include /Force in the command. This is something you may or may not want to do. In a nutshell:
GPUpdate: Applies any policies that is new or modified
GPUpdate /force: Reapplies every policy, new and old
We often times have reason to try and re-apply every policy, new and old but as you can imagine that can take up additional processing and network resources. Always be sensitive to the needs of your environment. You wouldn't want to run gpupdate /force on an entire school's worth of machines during online state testing, for example!
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