Networknet.nl

If you are migrating notebooks at work, from friends or family you will always hit same problem after the new one is ready for use. Most documents and user settings can be migrated in some kind (ntbackup,robocopy and the Windows transfer wizards) , but when migrating the wireless network setting you may need additional script to perform that. Recently I have been asked to reinstall couple of tools and migrate import user documents including the wireless network. I received both notebooks without the wireless access point and after all important things were moved to the new notebook I started running the netsh command to export the wireless settings/networks into a text file.

See my howto I performed to get this done on my own Windows VISTA notebook.

• Run CMD.exe to get into the command prompt and run “netsh wlan show profiles”

• I am interested in exporting the “NetworknetForFree” WLAN SSID into a text file which I can import on another notebook.
• I am still in the command prompt and than I execute “netsh wlan export profile name=”NetworknetForFree” folder=C:\” to export NetworknetForFree to C:\ drive.

• NetworknetForFree wireless network profile has now been exported to a file named “C:\Wireless Network Connection-NetworknetForFree.xml” and I can copy this file to a usb drive. If you want to export all your wireless profiles just run “netsh wlan export profile folder=C:\“
• The netsh tool generates a XML based file with all the settings for the wireless profile.

• Start a CMD.exe command prompt on the new notebook and import the XML file located on the usb drive. You can copy the XML file first from the usb dirve to C:\ and than import the file. Type and execute “netsh wlan add profile filename=”c:\Wireless Network Connection-NetworknetForFree.xml” user=all“

The wireless SSID “NetworknetForFree” network has been migrated without knowing the exact settings like SSID, authentication type and the password. I was also trying to perform these steps with a Windows XP SP2 client but too bad that this feature is only for Windows Vista and not XP.

This morning the Problem Reports and Solutions window pop-up in my screen.

I like many of the new features Vista has and especially this one when troubleshooting client issues. For example I run 7u program as a SVS layer and couple of times Windows Explorer stopped working as shown in the report above. I went to Event Viewer and tracked those events and found that 7-zip.dll

Don’t forget to check the Reliability and Performance Monitor once in a while. This will help you track problems back in history and especially when users are complaining about error messages. It helps you to graphically see when reliability  of the Vista client is downgrading. I have an index of 4.81 my vista client ok for time being.

Based on data collected over the lifetime of the system, each date in the System Stability Chart includes a graph point showing that day’s System Stability Index rating. The System Stability Index is a number from 1 (least stable) to 10 (most stable) and is a weighted measurement derived from the number of specified failures seen over a rolling historical period.

To open Reliability Monitor in Microsoft Management Console

1. Click Start, click in the Start Search box, type perfmon, and press ENTER.

2. In the navigation tree, expand Reliability and Performance, expand Monitoring Tools, and click Reliability Monitor.

After you have installed Hyper-V Remote Management mmc console on your Windows Vista SP1 client and you connect to your Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RC0 host servers which are sitting in a workgroup you will hit same problem as I did and many others.

You do not have the requested permission to complete this task. Contact the administrator of the authorization policy for the computer ‘COMPUTERNAME’

Basically what happens here is that Windows Firewalls on the client and server side are not configured to allow remote WMI management communication and the WMI and DCOM components will have to be manually configured. John Howard Senior Program Manager at Microsoft took 2,5 hours of his time and described in details how to fix this problem. Thanks to John I was able to get my communication up and running with my Hyper-V RC0 host server in less than 15 minutes. The netsh scripts didn’t work for me and I enabled the rules manually.

When trying to connect to one of my virtual machines I am prompt to enter my credentials. Use cmdkey /add servername /user:servername\user /pass to store the credentials. I tried this but my Lenovo Fingerprint software has some bugs and I get a lot of error messages; something to report to Lenovo… Anyway I am able to use the the Hyper-V mmc console from my Windows Vista client and I love it.