Mark Minasi's Windows Networking Tech Page
Issue #83 January 2010

What's Inside

News
- Join Me at a Seminar!
Tech Section
- Using Windows' "God Mode" Console
Conferences
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News

Hi all —

Happy new year! And with the new year comes the discovery of an undocumented-but-useful Windows feature that folks are calling the "god mode" console. Sound a bit hyped? Well, with that name, it is -- but it's still worth understanding. Consider it a late Christmas present from Microsoft and I'll tell you all about it but first, a word from our sponsor:

Current Seminars

The Complete Two-Day "Running an R2-Based Active Directory" Seminar Comes to Charlotte, San Francisco and Chicago in February, March and April at a Discount Rate

After a very successful one-day "beta" version of my new AD class (many thanks to our December attendees!), I got some material shaken down and found out what topics I needed to add to create a two-day AD class that you'll find a cost-effective use of your time. To kick off the new complete version of the class, I'm running sessions in Charlotte, SF and Chicago and knocking $100 off every seat.

As Active Directory enters its "tweens," most AD admins and managers have moved from "how do I design and set this up?" to "now that I'm in charge of somebody else's 10-year-old AD, how can I most easily and cheaply manage it, fix it, and streamline it?" I get (and answer) those questions all the time, and now I can answer them for you. Join me for a fun, fast-paced two day of AD setup, management, upgrading and troubleshooting. The course includes some in-depth DNS and AD troubleshooting, expert advice on safely virtualizing DCs, a practical, example-rich dive into solving AD admin problems with PowerShell, a quick review of the latest thinking on AD design and R2 upgrade, and in-depth discussions of R2's most significant "hey, I want that!" AD-related features. Everyone who's been asking for this class over the past year have been so patient that as a small "thank you," I'm running the first three sessions at $100/seat below the normal rate. The first run takes place in Charlotte (Feb 20-21), San Francisco (March 19-20), and Chicago (2-3 April), and if you're thinking of signing up, consider doing so early -- I was surprised to find that I had to close registration on the Seattle and New York classes last December. (The classes outgrew the hotel conference rooms we'd booked and there wasn't any place to move them to at that point.)

Find the course outline here and then you can sign up here. I hope to see you in Charlotte, San Fran, or Chicago!

Three New Audio Sets

Many of you couldn't make it to my Win 7, R2 or Cloud Computing talks, so we've got them available as audio sets:

With the holidays just around the corner, could you possibly imagine a better stocking stuffer?

My Free Replacement for Steady State... Steadier State

I know that a lot of you really miss Steady State, the tool that lets you essentially create virtual machine "snapshots," but on a physical copy of Windows like a classroom lab PC, public library workstation, kiosk PC etc, and that lets you un-do all of the mess done to a Windows box in under four minutes with no admin interaction needed. So I created what I call Steadier State. Put it on a PC, get it the way you like it, and snapshot the machine. Then turn it loose on the public for as long as you like, and reboot it. One of the reboot options will be "Roll Back Windows," and if you choose that, then in under four minutes everything that the users did is completely un-done. Give it a try at http://www.steadierstate.com.

Tech Section: Playing with the "God Mode" Easter Egg

A few days into the new year, word arrived about an interesting and newly-discovered Easter Egg in Windows 7 and 32-bit Vista that folks have named the "God Mode console" or "GMC." God mode? It's touted as a windows app that many bloggers have described as a single, does-it-all window to let you control everything about your computer and, with a bit of a stretch, one could call it that -- although you'd probably have to do Pilates every day before you could safely execute that stretch.

More accurately, however, GMC is simply an Explorer window containing a single all-in-one-place listing of all control panel pages. Even that, however, can be quite useful, as you can see from this screen shot.

In this picture, you can see a couple of things about the GMC. First of all, is just a folder (albeit a special one, as we'll see), viewed with Explorer. Here, I've arranged the window so that the portion you can see -- there are zillions of Control Panel settings, so there's no way I could show you the whole thing -- displays the items in the Network and Sharing Center. Now, one of the places that I use the most in the Network and Sharing Center is the "View network connections" page. It's the place where you get a list of all of your NICs, where you can bring up their network properties, re-order network bindings (a once-again valuable tool in a world where we'll soon all be doing both IPv4 and IPv6), and the like. Normally it takes a few clicks to get to the "View network connections" page, but from the GMC, it's just one click so hey, that ain't bad. What the GMC does not do, however, is show any "hidden" or "secret" features, as some Web pages have claimed. (Of course, the fastest way to get there is to just click Start and then type "ncpa.cpl" in the "Search programs and files" field, then press Enter.)

So how to get a GMC of your own? Simple.

First, create a new folder. You can do it anywhere on your computer -- any drive, second-level folders, you name it.

Second, name it anything.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} where anything can be, well, anything, any text. Every Web page I've seen so far says that the anything text must be the phrase "godmode" but a look at my screen shot above shows that I named mine Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} and it works just fine.

Now open up the folder, and voila, you've got a GMC. But that's not all that you can do with it; I was sort of surprised to find that

Deleting it can be a problem. In some experiments, I've been unable to delete the folder, and get an error that the folder's in use elsewhere, no matter how careful I am to shut down other Explorer and Control Panel windows. In those cases, just rebooting let me delete the GMC folder.
You can do it on either an NTFS or FAT32 drive.
You can put it on a removable drive and carry it around. Whether on a CF card, a USB stick, or an SDHC card, a GMC folder works like a charm when plugged into a compatible computer.
It responds to different views. It comes up in Details view by default, but others work as well. Try out List view, it's more concise.

Finally, which operating systems support a GMC? I've made it work on

Windows 7 x64
Windows 7 x86
Vista x86
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition
Windows Server 2008 x86

It has not, however, worked on 64-bit Vista; trying to open an Explorer that contains one of the GMC folders causes Explorer to crash. If that happens to you, just open up an elevated command prompt and type

rd /s /q

And then press "Tab" until the folder name like "Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" or whatever you named it to appears, then press the Enter key. Also, you might do your experiments not with a folder at the root level, but instead a second-level folder -- create Hi.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} inside a folder named "c:\test" rather in c:\ so if you do end up with a system that doesn't like GMCs, you can still open up Explorer on C: without crashing Explorer.

I hope I've offered a bit of insight and a few ideas on using what might better be called the "flat-mode Control Panel View." I'd love to hear of your experiences with it!

Mark's upcoming conference appearances

Conferences

Windows Cloud Connections, Las Vegas March 26-29 2012

The Connections folks have assembled a show that is, as you can tell, cloud-focused, featuring folks like my friends Brian Desmond, Paul Thurrott, Sean Deuby, Don Jones, Jim McBee and others (as well as me) talking about cloud and cloud-related technologies. I'll be doing my "Windows 8: A Report from the Future" keynote, as well as my DNS troubleshooting talk (just try to get your cloud stuff working when DNS is broken, as, um, Microsoft found out last year in their cloud offering) and my popular IPv6 talk (where do you think we're going to get the addresses we'll need for all those cloud servers now that we're out of IPv4 addresses?).

Find out more at http://cloudconnections.com/shows/sp2012/default.aspx?s=187.

The 6th Annual Minasi Forum Conference, Virginia Beach April 29-May 2 2012

We took a year off but we're back! Ten years ago, I started my online forum at www.minasi.com/forum and am blessed with a globe-spanning array of very smart and helpful folks. Six of the past seven years, we've met in Virginia Beach to network and present some great topics. We've got some big names -- Mark Russinovich will Skype in to talk to us about Azure, PowerShell Gods Don Jones (who's keynoting and doing some PS stuff) and Ed Wilson, The Scripting Guy will talk about, well, PowerShell -- but that's not all. This conference is also a chance for some of our forum members, most of whom aren't "big names" but who spend their days in the trenches, to talk about the things that they know inside and out. You may not yet know James Summerlin, Anne O'Day, Stacy Hein, Dennis Olidis, Curt Spanburgh, Jim Vigotti, Dave Bison, Eric Rux and others ... but you will once you've heard their great coverage of SQL, SharePoint, Sysinternals system repair tools, AppV and other topics. (There's also a rumor that I'm going to do a session or two.) What you may like best of all, however, is the price -- $450. We'll have the details up soon, but you'll be able to find out more (and until then, you can see 2010's schedule) at www.minasiconference.com.

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Mark Minasi's Windows Networking Tech Page Issue #83 January 2010