Tag Archives: server 2008

Shutdown.exe has a GUI

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Shutdown.exe is the extremley useful built-in command line utility to shutdown, restart or logoff your computer. It has several switches to control what you want to do, but unusually for a command line utility, it also has a very nice, simple GUI also.

Enter the following into your command prompt to launch the program with its GUI: Shutdown.exe -i

As you can see from the image above, there are several options, all of which you can do with switches on the command line also. What you can do with the GUI however, is paste in a crlf separated list of computer names, or use the ‘Browse’ facility to search for and choose computers to shutdown from your directory.

Very nice.

Deleting Profiles Correctly – Server 2008

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This also applies to Windows Vista and Windows 7.

User profiles are normally stored in C:\Users\<username>. Some people might think that to delete profiles (to clear up disk space, or if the profile becomes corrupted), you delete the <username> folder in the Users folder and all is done. If you simply do this, registry keys will be left in the registry that are associated with the profile, and if a user whose profile folder you’ve deleted tries to log on, they will receive a temporary, un-saveable profile.

Doing things properly

  • Open system settings (right click on computer and choose properties).
  • Open Advanced System Settings (to the left of the system settings window.
  • Click on the Advanced tab.
  • Click the ‘Settings’ button under User Profiles.
  • Select the user profile you want to remove from the list that appears in the User Profiles window.
  • Press Delete.

If it’s too late….

If you’ve already deleted the user’s profile folder without deleteing the profile properly,you can remove the associated registry keys:

  • Open Registry Editor (run regedit)
  • Navigate to
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  • Delete any keys with reference to the deleted user’s profile.
  • The keys have pretty unreadable names, but each key has a string value called ‘ProfileImagePath’ that has the familiar username in there.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

How to Install WordPress MU on IIS 7 on Windows 2008 Server

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I originally posted this on the WordPress MU forum, but thought I’d post it here too.

I’m always asking for and searching for help in places like this, especially because we host WordPress (and now WPMU!) on Windows servers!

Hopefully this will help other people that want to run WordPress MU on Windows. We used WordPress MU Version 2.8.6 and are running IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008.

I’m just going to tell you how we got WPMU running, not how to install PHP and MySQL and all that stuff. There’s plenty out there about that, but less about this specific topic:

How to Install WordPress MU on IIS 7
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Download WordPress mu

Extract and copy into desired directory on IIS 7 web server

Give IUSR user account modify and write permissions on the directory in IIS

Create database and user with all permissions to use it in MySql
Navigate to the location of your site (where your files are stored on IIS)

Enter the required information in the mu installation screen – make sure your server address isn’t a single word – such as ‘mysite’, use ‘mysite.com, even if your mu installation is internal. We tried installing our site at ‘mysite’ for testing purposes, everything worked as described below, except we couldn’t log into the admin side using Firefox or IE 8 – only safari could log us in, something to do with the cookies used to process login.

We used sub-directories, we couldn’t get sub-domains to work.
Enter all the other details on the mu installation screen as expected, then press install.

We got a 500 Internal Server Error, but not to worry, everything’s been created!

Normally the admin password would be e-mailed to the address you entered on the previous screen, but in our case it wasn’t (on-going issues with the php mail function and receiving mail to our Exchange 2007 Server).

What we did to get round this was to go into the database in phpMyAdmin and manually change the password (user_pass field in the wp_users table) to one of our choosing, but be sure to use the ‘md5’ function to encrypt your password before you update your table.
Go back to your server address to see the home blog running as it should.

Log in with the ‘admin’ user and the password you’ve just set.
We didn’t have to make any changes to get pretty permalinks working (I’m sure you would on IIS 6 though – they seem to be the default option with mu. What we did do though is remove /blog/ from the permalink structure under Blog > Edit. I don’t know why this was added by default, but we don’t want it, so removed it. We for some reason it didn’t work the first time we navigated to a page, we got the not found error, although the link we tried was pointing to the correct location – without /blogs/

We can now create and manage as many blogs as we like (sub sites actually) and we’ve even got the WPDirAuth plugin working with them.

Hope this helps someone.