Best Practice Ezine #24 CacheMov and Dcgpofix

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Guy’s Best Practice & Litmus Tests Ezine #24 – CacheMov and Dcgpofix

SUS and now WUS – Information supplied kindly by reader B.A.

If you remember SUS from last week, well it now has a new baby brother called WUS (Windows Update Services).  Whereas SUS is for the operating system, WUS is an update management solution for, Office, SQL Server, and other Microsoft products.

What I particularly like about SUS and WUS is that they fit into my vision of the future.  I believe that there are going to be fewer people in IT, but those people remaining will be more highly skilled.  Recommendation: get your copy of WUS free from Microsoft and reduce the time it takes to update programs.

Guy Recommends: The Free IP Address Tracker (IPAT) IP Tracker

Calculating IP Address ranges is a black art, which many network managers solve by creating custom Excel spreadsheets.  IPAT cracks this problem of allocating IP addresses in networks in two ways:

For Mr Organized there is a nifty subnet calculator, you enter the network address and the subnet mask, then IPAT works out the usable addresses and their ranges. 

For Mr Lazy IPAT discovers and then displays the IP addresses of existing computers. Download the Free IP Address Tracker

CacheMov for offline files on Laptops.

One of my recurring hobby horses is – not enough free space on the system partition.  If you have laptops, CacheMov is useful to move offline files to a different partition and thereby create more free space.  (Laptops are notoriously mean on disk space).

Surprisingly, offline cache files are stored by default under the %systemroot%\csc folder. What CacheMov does is to relocate this folder to root of another drive, for example E: \csc.  Gung-ho Guy says, just double click CacheMov and then decide if you want to select another partition or cancel.

Naturally, you must be an Administrator to run CacheMov.exe.  One reader wanted to move the cache to a network drive or a removable drive. Would that make sense?  I think not.  You want the offline cache on the local machine not on a network drive.  I would always store offline files on NTFS, however, if you insist, CacheMov will redirect your offline files to a FAT32 or even a FAT volume.  Free Download of CacheMov.

Security Configuration Analysis and dcgpofix.

Security Configuration Analysis is another wonderful utility to apply your group policies to  a Windows 2003 domain.  Again it fits in with my ‘Work Smarter’ concept.  The idea is to create a template to apply all your password, account lockout and zillions of other group policies.  It’s smart because all the settings are stored in one place.   For someone like me who is poor at who is poor at documentation, these templates are wonderful as they keep a record of all the settings that I have configured.  Locate the Security Configuration and Analysis wizard by adding a ‘Snap in’ to your MMC.

Traditionally, everyone who tries these security templates, sooner or later ‘screws up’ by applying a really viscous policy.  For example, you apply draconian measures such as deny the right to logon locally.  One little known utility for removing such a policy is dcgpofix which just sets the policy back to how it was when the machine was first installed.

See more about Group Policy here.Group Policy


Lots of useful computer services

Solarwinds Orion NPM Review  • How to Shut Down Win8   •Win8 Eventlog   • Win8 FAQ  • Ezines

E 167 WinDiff  •E 131 BigInfo  •E 123 WinDiff   • E 102 SysPrep  •E 69 Perfmon  •E62 WinDiff

E 25 Event Trigger   • E 24 CacheMov  • E 18 Services  •E 16 Perfmon  • Exchange Monitor