You can change a Windows User Account password that is on any Windows computer from any other Windows computer regardless of whether the User Account is on a workstation, a stand-alone server, or a Windows domain controller. Additionally, it makes no difference whether the password being changed from a workstation, a stand-alone server, or a Windows domain controller. This is true for any NT 4.0, W2K, XP Pro and Windows Server 2003 computer.

You do not have to be logged on from the User Account Database that contains the Username, and you do not have to be currently logged on with that Username. This procedure is especially useful if you want to change your password in a User Account Database or security accounts manager that is not in your default logon domain.

To change your password:

1.Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the Windows Security dialog box.
2.Press the Change Password button.
3.Enter the User name whose password you wish to change.
4. In the From dialog box, click either the computer name or domain name in the drop-down list box, or type the computer name or domain name that contains the User Account Database where the user name exists.
5. Type the appropriate password in the Old Password, New Password, and Confirm New Password box.

You should receive a message indicating “Your password has been changed.”

This procedure is allowed even if the User Right “Access this computer from network” is disabled for the group Everyone. Changing a password does not use resources on the server. The ability to change a password without requiring the user to be logged on allows a user to change his or her password outside of the user’s logon hours, or when the password has expired and the user is not able to log on.

How do I create a new user account on windows 2003?

Even if you will not be using Terminal Services or have any other users using your server it is ALWAYS recommended to create an additional two (2) users, apart from Administrator. These two users are - another member of the “Administrators” group (to avoid actually logging on with the Administrator account, but you have the same privileges) AND a regular user, who is part of the “Users” group. It is recommended to only log on with the regular user, and use the “runas” command when you need to run a program as an Administrator, and to only log on with the secondary Administrator user when it is absolutely needed. This will show you how to create a secondary Administrator.

>>>>>>>>

Click the Start button, then Run…

Then type lusrmgr.msc

In the window that opens, right click in the right panel and click “New User”

In the New User dialog, type in your new user name and password (this will be our secondary Administrator account). Uncheck User must change password, and check Password never expires

Now, right click the new user and click Properties in the pop up menu

Go to the “Member of” tab and press the Add button

Type Administrators, then press the Check Names button (to complete the name, it will add the name of your computer) and press OK when it is done, then press OK on the Local Users and Groups dialog

We now have a secondary Administrator account! To have a regular user (highly recommended) do the same as above, until the User properties.

To enable the RDP service on Windows Server 2003 follow the next steps:

1.  Go to Control Panel.
2.  Click System.
3.  Go to the Remote tab.
4.  Select the “Allow users to connect remotely to this computer” box.
5.  Click Ok.

Note: In order for the RDP connection to work you need to allow TCP port 3389 connections to the server. You also need the name and password of one of the local (or domain) administrators, because this type of connection is only allowed for administrative accounts.

Here is the “Advanced TCP/IP settings” article for windows users..

Advanced TCP/IP settings :-

The Advanced TCP/IP dialog will allow you to configure settings relative to DNS, WINS and specify multiple IP Addresses and Gateways. To bring up the Advanced TCP/IP Settings dialog, simply right click the desired connection from the Network Connections folder, and choose properties to open the Properties dialog of the selected connection. Now select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) from the list and click the Properties button. This will open the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog. Next, click the Advanced button and up pops the Advanced TCP/IP Settings dialog with four tabs to choose from:

IP Settings allows you to add more IP Addresses or change the routing properties of the network card.

Options allows you to set TCP/IP Filtering and specify which ports will be used for TCP/IP communication.

The IP Settings Tab : -

The IP addresses box at the top allows you to assign additional IP Addresses to a single network card. This is useful if you are hosting multiple websites on the same web server and want to give each its own IP Address for example.

Simply click the Add button to add an IP Address and Subnet Mask. Click Edit to modify the currently selected item and Remove to delete the currently selected item from the list.

The Default gateways box in the middle is used if you want the network connection to use multiple default gateways. Click the Add button to add a Default gateway and assign it a Metric value. A metric value is the cost of a specific route. Cost can reflect speed, reliability and number of hops. The route with the lowest metric value is used, so if you have two Default Gateways set up, one with a metric of 10 and the other with a metric of 20, the one with 10 will be chosen first. Leaving the metric at automatic means that the route metric for this default gateway will be calculated automatically, and the fastest route chosen.

The Edit and Remove buttons in the Default gateways box do exactly the same as for the IP addresses box.

At the bottom of the IP Settings tab you can set whether you want the Interface to have a specific metric or to be assigned one automatically. By default this option is checked. Uncheck it if you wish to input an Interface metric value of your choice.

The DNS Tab : -

The “DNS server addresses, in order of use box” at the top of the DNS tab is used to list the IP Addresses of the DNS Servers that will be used for name resolution. These servers are ordered and used in priority, so if one server does not work then it will move to the next one down the list. To set the order of IP Addresses, select an IP Address and press the up and down button on the right hand side.

It is important to keep in mind that TCP/IP will not move on to the next server if it fails to resolve the request. It will only move to the next server if the first server it tries is unavailable (perhaps down for maintenance or in the middle of a reboot).

Append primary and connection specific DNS suffixes, and Append parent suffixes of the primary DNS suffix are enabled by default. These options are used for resolution of unqualified names.

The first option is used to resolve unqualified names using the parent domain. For example, if you had a computer name of test and a parent domain called trulymanaged.com it would resolve to test.trulymanaged.com. The query would fail if test.trulymanaged.com does not exist in the parent domain. The second option is used to resolve unqualified names using the parent-child domain hierarchy. A DNS query will move one step up the domain hierarchy if it fails at the current level. It will do this until it reaches the root of the hierarchy.

The textbox on the right of the DNS suffix for this connection is used to explicitly set a DNS suffix that will override any other setting already specified for this connection.

Register this connections addresses in DNS will register all this connections IP Addresses in DNS under the computers FQDN. Using this connections DNS suffix in DNS registration will register all IP Addresses for this connection in DNS under the parent domain.

The WINS Tab : -

The WINS tab is used to specify WINS related settings such as the list of WINS servers to be used for NETBIOS name to IP resolution, the LMHOSTS file to be used as an alternate means of lookups and the NETBIOS settings for the network connection.

Use the “WINS addresses, in order of use box” at the top to add the WINS servers you want the system to use for IP to name resolution. Press the Add button for a small dialog box to appear waiting for you to enter the IP Address of the WINS server. Use the Edit and Remove buttons to modify or delete a selected item respectively. If you have more than one WINS server in the list, press the up and down arrow buttons to adjust the priority of which servers will be queried first. If one server is not available then the next one down will be used, and so on and so forth.

Check the Enable LMHOSTS lookup checkbox so that if WINS cannot resolve a name then the local LMHOSTS file will be used. The LMHOSTS file can be found in \WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. It goes by the name of lmhosts.sam and can be modified in a text editor. Entries are placed at the bottom of the file and when used, the listed IP Addresses are matched against a specified host name. If you already have an LMHOSTS file defined on another machine on the network, use the Import LMHOSTS button to select this file and import it to the local machine.

The NETBIOS settings at the bottom allow you to explicitly define how NETBIOS will be used on the system. Choose Default if you want the DHCP server to assign the NETBIOS setting, Enable NETBIOS over TCP/IP if you use a static IP Address or the DHCP Server does not give NETBIOS settings, and Disable NETBIOS over TCP/IP if you do not use NETBIOS or WINS on your network.

The Options Tab (TCP/IP Filtering) :-

The Options tab allows you to configure TCP/IP Filtering settings; you can define which ports or protocols are permitted. Select the Permit Only radio button and use the Add button to add TCP/UDP port numbers or a protocol version to the respective list. If you permit traffic only from a defined set of ports, all other traffic will be dropped.

ERROR:

You getting emails from Plesk, or getting Following error while pressing “Retrieve Keys” from Plesk >> Server >> License Management

Licensing Server Unreachable: Unable to connect with licensing server.
Please make sure that your network allows communication to ka.swsoft.com:5224.
For more details check system help pages

SOLUTION:

Plesk connects Parallels license server at 5224 port for the license update procedure. Make sure that the outgoing connection to ka.swsoft.com:5224 is not blocked on Plesk server or somewhere in the net. This can be examined with commands:

# nmap -P0 -p5224 ka.swsoft.com

[root@support ~]# nmap -P0 -p5224 ka.swsoft.com

Starting nmap 3.70 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2008-11-05 10:00 EST
Interesting ports on ka.parallels.com (64.131.90.38):
PORT     STATE    SERVICE
5224/tcp filtered unknown

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 2.205 seconds

# telnet ka.swsoft.com 5224

[root@support ~]# telnet ka.swsoft.com 5224
Trying 64.131.90.38...
Connected to ka.swsoft.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

Difference Between MSSQL Server 2005 Express, Standard and Work group Edition

MS SQL 2005 Express Edition features are as follows :

* CPU : No
* 1 GB max memory limit for buffer pool : Yes
* 4GB max database size : Yes
* SQL Server Agent : Yes
* Full Text Search : Yes
* IMPORT/EXPORT : No
* Basic Integration Services : No
* Advanced Integration Services : Yes

MSSQL 2005 Standard Edition features are as follows :

* CPU : Yes
* 1 GB max memory limit for buffer pool : No
* 4GB max database size : No
* SQL Server Agent : Yes
* Full Text Search : Yes
* IMPORT/EXPORT : Yes
* Basic Integration Services : Yes
* Advanced Integration Services : Yes

MSSQL 2005 Workgroup Edition features are as follows :

* CPU : Yes
* 1 GB max memory limit for buffer pool : No
* 4GB max database size : No
* SQL Server Agent : Yes
* Full Text Search : Yes
* IMPORT/EXPORT : Yes
* Basic Integration Services : No
* Advanced Integration Services : No

If your sites are using php as the major scripting & the server load is highly around 10+, PHP Cachers like APC , Xcache or Eaccelerator can are really help to minimize the load to 1-2.

APC: The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. It was conceived of to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.

XCache: XCache is a open-source opcode cacher, which means that it accelerates the performance of PHP on servers. It optimizes performance by removing the compilation time of PHP scripts by caching the compiled state of PHP scripts into the shm (RAM) and uses the compiled version straight from the RAM. This will increase the rate of page generation time by up to 5 times as it also optimizes many other aspects of php scripts and reduce serverload.

Eaccelerator: It is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

Operations running 24×7 are the key objectives of business continuityin any organization. It is a best practice to  establish data centers & sites in different geographic regions with replicated applications and data using geographic redundancy.

Implementing geographic redundancy is the main task which can be done in different ways. Deploying multiple sites & using some software to duplicate the data is the significant investment. Now a days IT professionals  build redundant sites as a backup and manually manage data replication and failover to the secondary site when needed. By virtualizing data center resources at both sites, you can turn non-performing assets into an ongoing available asset.

A better practice is to virtualize your server and application resources-a much more cost effective and a better overall architecture. Instead of deploying that very expensive mid-range system, virtualize multiple, low-cost, high-performance servers with applications and data, so when one server fails you are not impacted. This gives you the opportunity to achieve high availability and performance without breaking the bank.

SA is the administrative login for the MSSQL. To Change the MSSQL SA password please use following steps:

Step 1. Go to the command prompt of the server ( Start >> Run >> Cmd ) and type in command prompt
osql –L
This command will list all the MSSQL servers near you.

Step 2. Copy full name of required MSSQL server and type
osql -S copied_servername –E
By this command you’ll connect to MSSQL server using Server administrator account (Windows Authentication).

Step 3. To change sa password you should execute the following query:
1> sp_password NULL,’new_password’,’sa’
2> go

Here the new_password will be the password which you want to set.

Now try to login to MSSQL using new password.

How to converting MYSQL table from InnoDB engine to MyISAM

I have problem of table repair in InnoDB so I need to convert InnoDB to the engine MyISAM.

I converted a MySQL table’s InnoDB to the engine MyISAM.

The code I found for conversion:

ALTER TABLE Tablename ENGINE=MYISAM

You can replace MYISAM engine to InnoDB, ISAM, HEAP and etc.