Under Development

Posted on 11 Jul 2007 at 15:59

 

Gallery

If these products were people, Nexus would be Kelly Holmes (slim and fast, consuming under 10MB of RAM while giving access to more than 10 databases) and SQL Server Express would be what you'd get from crossing Rick Waller with Anne Diamond. If you want the computer equivalent of 'who ate all the pies?' then SQL Express is the product for you. To do the same job as Nexus, it consumes anywhere between 54 and 250MB of RAM on my PC, depending on how hungry it is.

At your command

I should stop. Knocking Microsoft is poor sport and, in fairness, when fixing stuff it sometimes does a great job. Like a lot of old timers, I often prefer to do many system administration tasks using the command-line interface (Start, Run, type cmd and press Enter). For repetitive tasks, you can string commands together to form scripts, also known as batch files, as you submit the batch of commands for processing. Renaming a bunch of files, say, is much easier this way than trying (and failing) with the miserable Windows Explorer.

But the command-line interface is as old as the hills, going back to the times before even Windows 3.0, when Gates was worth just a billion or so. It's not broken, just well past its sell-by date. Microsoft has rectified this with the introduction of PowerShell, a new scripting language that works on XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista. If you compare any Windows variants with Unix, you'll find the latter offers the systems administrator a richer set of tools for automating complex maintenance tasks. The more complex the task, the more you want to automate so, once a routine is sorted, there's less chance of making a mistake. PowerShell addresses this weakness.

As a language, it looks like any of the C variants (particularly C#) and also bears a resemblance to Perl and PHP. What can you use it for? How about moving large numbers of files older than a certain date from multiple file folders to one or more archive folders? Or managing RSS newsfeeds? Or automating regular Windows Explorer tasks using COM? There's no end to what you can do with PowerShell. It's a free download from http://tinyurl.com/yk5h8l. However, you will also need to have the .NET framework installed to run it.

PowerShell in Action by Bruce Payette (see www.drsaxon.co.uk for a review) will introduce you to what you can do with PowerShell and how to go about it.

Final nail in the coffin

Recently a customer had an old PC he wanted to scrap. It had a copy of his accounts system on it and he was concerned about security. How could he ensure that the recycle centre staff couldn't extract this information?

One sure-fire way, I told him, was to drive a six-inch nail through the hard disk; it's quicker than doing a low-level format. So he did just that. Two days later, he asked if it would be possible to recover a copy of the accounts. He'd forgotten to take an archive copy before driving home the nail, and his original backup was unreadable. Moral: test that backups can be restored before you trust them. And add another saying to the collection: look before you leap.

Author: David Robinson