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After the Windows Server 2003 SP2 release, I decided to give the Hotfix Scan Tool a spin, to see if it would identify any potential problems prior to testing the SP2 installation itself.

The first thing noticed was that the installation details on the download page are incorrect. The site states "Download the compressed file and double-click to activate it. It will then extract files to a directory you choose." which doesn't apply to this download. The installation routine places HotFixScanTool.vbs directly in %systemroot%\system32.

Secondly, since this is a vbscript, and it's installed in the system path, you should be able to run it by double clicking it, typing the filename in a cmd window or directly from the run command on the start menu. In my case, that didn't work and I got the following error:

Doing Start->Run->cmd.exe and typing in cscript %systemroot%\system32\HotFixScanTool.vbs did the trick though:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>cscript %systemroot%\system32\HotFixScanTool.vbs
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

Detecting if any updates in the Block installation list were 
installed on the system...

No updates in the block installation list were detected.
You can proceed to install Windows Server 2003 SP2

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

So far, so good but if this is an indication of the quality level of the rest of SP2 I'm somewhat worried.

All of a sudden, Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 is available for download. Check the Microsoft site for more details regarding what patches are included in SP2.

Microsoft has also made a Hotfix Scan Tool available than scans for hotfixes that will potentially regress after the installation. Be sure to run that to make sure everything applies properly. The tool can be run before SP2 deployment as well as after.

KB931940 should have more details about the tool (vbscript) but that seems to be unavailable at the time of writing.

Happy patching and updating.

Update 1: If you run, or plan to run, Windows Server 2003 R2 be sure to upgrade to R2 before applying Service Pack 2. If you don’t, you will not be able to uninstall SP2 after the R2 installation.

Update 2: Apparently you need to uninstall IE7 before installing SP2, as SP2 installs IE6. I have not verified this though.

The daunting task of cleaning up fileshares in a Windows environment has been one that I've postponed to the greatest extent. While we have a group hierarchy in place to limit access to departmental data, we also have a common file storage share with free-for-all permissions in place.

We all know that the odds of people actually cleaning up that mess are close to zero, and thus the storage space occupied by that fileshare increases greatly over time. Simply asking our users to clean it up doesn't help, so I decided we need to force a cleanup. All files older than 01. Jan. 2005, should be moved to an archive location and then locked for editing. If our users need to edit the documents/files, they will need to open then and save them.

Enter RoboCopy.

RoboCopy is a powerful utility from Microsoft, that allows you to copy/move files and folders, based on a number of parameters handed to it. After going through all the parameters, we ended up with the following commandline:

robocopy [source] [destination] /E /MOV /SEC /MINAGE:20050101

Parameter explanation:

/E copies all subdirs, including empty ones.
/MOV moves instead of copying
/SEC maintains NTFS security tokens
/MINAGE exclude files newer than n days/date

So far so good, the copying went fine, files moved without problems. We did, however, get stranded with a lot (800) empty directories, since the directories themselves had a newer timestamp than 20050101. This combined with the fact that some directories should be kept as they were before the cleanup left us with the non-trivial task of cleaning out the empty ones.

Enter Remove empty directories (RED) - Version 1.4

Very nice GUI based utility for scanning and deletion of empty directories. One scan later, 800 empty directories found and deleted.