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Published On: Jul 24, 2004 10:32 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jul 24, 2004 10:32 PM
Only network geeks would find this interesting
I actually had a practical
use for an old networking command that I haven't used in years.
This is really just to remind myself of a handy
utility that I finally have a use
for.
Russ at work came to me a couple of days ago asking for some help. He manages an Access database that is used for our department's time tracking and currently some 300 or more folks enter time daily. He needed to update a portion of the database but had a single user who had been logged in for two days. The only piece of information he had was the machine name, which in our network looks something like "BEST-1902AFD09B2". Looking for this out of 800+ machines in the department was not a possibility.
I immediately thought about having a friend in our IS department pull a quick SMS search on the machine name and get us the user ID of the person logging in to that machine. When I called Dan and told him what I needed, he simply told me to use "nbtstat -a" plus the machine name. Duh.
Sure enough this command polls the remote machine and retrieves a few bits of information including the login name of the last user. In this case we saw an ID and looked it up in our email address book find the person's name. Russ smirked when he saw the user's name and said, "Figures. He's always complaining about how the time tracking system never works. No WONDER if you stay logged in for two days!"
But more important to Russ was this new command. Apparently he'd needed something like this for quite some time.
Russ at work came to me a couple of days ago asking for some help. He manages an Access database that is used for our department's time tracking and currently some 300 or more folks enter time daily. He needed to update a portion of the database but had a single user who had been logged in for two days. The only piece of information he had was the machine name, which in our network looks something like "BEST-1902AFD09B2". Looking for this out of 800+ machines in the department was not a possibility.
I immediately thought about having a friend in our IS department pull a quick SMS search on the machine name and get us the user ID of the person logging in to that machine. When I called Dan and told him what I needed, he simply told me to use "nbtstat -a" plus the machine name. Duh.
Sure enough this command polls the remote machine and retrieves a few bits of information including the login name of the last user. In this case we saw an ID and looked it up in our email address book find the person's name. Russ smirked when he saw the user's name and said, "Figures. He's always complaining about how the time tracking system never works. No WONDER if you stay logged in for two days!"
But more important to Russ was this new command. Apparently he'd needed something like this for quite some time.
Posted: Sat - July 24, 2004 at 10:32 PM