Category Archives: Networking

How to remotely uninstall software?

There’s a lot of times when you just want to uninstall a piece of software without interrupting the end user, but unfortunately there isn’t an easy, out of the box way to do it.

To uninstall software on a local machine without any user interaction, you would do something like this:
msiexec.exe /norestart /qn /x {2902F983-B4C1-44BA-B85D-5C6D52E2C441}

The last part, after /x is the GUID of installed software. To find out the guid on remote software, download this script from here and run this command:
cscript /B SwInventory.vbs RemotePC > RemotePC.txt

Open RemotePC.txt and look for GUID.

Next you need PsExec from SysInternals. This tool will allow you to run commands on the remote computer.

Once you find out the GUID of the software that you need to uninstall, you can make a batch file with msiexec.exe command on it. Like:
msiexec.exe /norestart /qn /x {2902F983-B4C1-44BA-B85D-5C6D52E2C441} and name it uninstall.bat

If you need to uninstall more than one software, just create new lines with new GUIDs, example:
msiexec.exe /norestart /qn /x {2902F983-B4C1-44BA-B85D-5C6D52E2C441}
msiexec.exe /norestart /qn /x {18455581-E099-4BA8-BC6B-F34B2F06600C}

Next you run PsExec tool and copy and run the batch file to the remote with command:
psexec \\remotepc -c uninstall.bat

You will need to run cmd as an administrator in order to be able to execute remote commands.

If the software uninstalled successfully, you will get error code 0, if not, it will say something like “this action is only valid for products that are currently installed.”

This will be useful when you need to uninstall same software from multiple computers. An antivirus product is a good example if you are upgrading to another one.

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Windows Small Business Server (SBS) 2008 transition / migration to Server Standard 2008 R2

(First appeared here)

This is an action plan from Microsoft tech support.  I’m going to be testing this in my Lab over the next week or so.  I’ll post any significant notes or corrections that I find.  

1.       Run ADprep on SBS 2008 with the Windows 2008 R2 disk.

·         Insert the media for Windows Server 2008 R2 into the Small Business Server 2008 server.

·         Browse to the following folder:

·         <DVD drive >:\Sources\Adprep> Adprep /forestprep

·         Press C, and then press ENTER. Wait for the process to complete.

·         <DVD drive >:\Sources\Adprep>Adprep /domainPrep 

·         when this step completes, you should receive a message: “Adprep successfully update the domain-wide Information” Read more »

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RackSpace Cloud Review

About 4 months ago I tried Amazon EC2 with Ubuntu image and found it somehow difficult to configure the server, especially if you are not familiar with cli. Making an ssh remote connection required downloading few encryption keys from amazon. Linux server images from amazon seem to not have root password, therefore private and I think public keys are created for you to connect with ssh, which make it more secure. It took me about 2 hours to figure out how to use those keys. I worked with Linux boxes before, in fact I never hosted a site on Windows machine, and never will, but I didn’t have to use a ssh connection to configure my server. Read more »

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Nice tool to recover/retrieve wep/wpa wireless keys

Nice and simple tool to recover wireless encryption keys.  It is very helpful and quick when you have a machine already connected to the network but you cannot remember the key to add another one.  The link is here http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wireless_key.html

Go all the way to the bottom and download it. Unzip and run. You can even save the results as text file.

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Will Windows 7 support 20 concurrent network connections?

netserver

It looks like Windows 7 will support up to 20 users connected to a share or network sessions. That is great news for small to medium size companies that use Windows XP to share files. That’s double of what  Windows XP will handle.

Read more »

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