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My office's various Windows NT workstations behave differently toward the Num Lock key's boot-up status. How can I control these behaviors?
On Windows 2000 (Win2K) and NT systems, a Registry value controls the Num Lock key's status at startup. You can manually set the value on a specific machine, or you can control groups of machines by using a group or system policy (i.e., the former for Win2K systems and the latter for NT systems) that contains a reference to the Registry value.
You can find this value in the HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard Registry key. The InitialKeyboardIndicators subkey is of type REG_SZ and can have a value of 0 (i.e., NumLock Off, the default value) or 2 (i.e., NumLock On).
Until recently, I've used the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit's Scopy utility to preserve file and directory permissions when I migrate files between network servers. Scopy lacks features that I'd like to have for these tasks, but professional file-migration and replication packages are costly. Can you recommend any freeware or shareware utilities that can copy NTFS permissions, auditing, and ownership information?
Scopy lacks logging features and is occasionally unreliable during copy operations. For example, Scopy sometimes skips files for no apparent reason and without an accompanying error message. You can work around the utility's lack of logging features by piping the command's output to a text file: Simply place an output redirection symbol and filename at the end of the command line, such as
scopy *.* D:\ ><filename.txt>
However, Scopy's limitations make the utility ill-suited for use with NTFS-based files on file servers or other mission-critical systems.
As an alternative, you can use the resource kit's Robocopy utility for individual copy and move operations or for ongoing directory replication. Robocopy supports the preservation of NTFS permissions, auditing, and ownership information during copy and move operations (if you run Robocopy with the /sec switch). The utility also offers several other useful features, such as the abilities to mirror entire directory structures, seed directory structures on a target drive without copying files, exclude files that meet certain criteria, and restart aborted copy operations at the point of failure. You can use the At command (or Task Scheduler, depending on your NT service pack level) to schedule Robocopy to perform particular file-copy or directory-mirroring tasks at various intervals during the day.
Because Robocopy provides superior flexibility and efficiency, you might even consider using Robocopy in lieu of NT's built-in directory-replication service for intraserver replication of the Netlogon folder's contents.