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Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tools

Wednesday, 31 October 2007 by Michel Roth

Using the /3GB switch in Terminal Server environments is like cutting off one leg of a football player. Still, on some very rare occasions using the /3GB switch might just work out for you.

Unfortunately, chances are that most of the time you'll get more -lots more- trouble from using this switch in Terminal Server environments, even more than you started out with. Even in non-Terminal Server environments, using the /3GB switch could cause you trouble.

The Windows Performance team blog has a detailed article up on what you can do to troubleshoot Event ID 333 (which usually is the consequence of improperly using the /3GB switch). This article is very much worth reading because it has a lot of useful links as well as interesting content.

So what does Event ID 333 have to do with the title of this post? Well, the thing I am most exited about is that the article referred me to a Microsoft page that hosts the Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tools! These tools are broken down into several separate downloads, each with their own specialty. When you download the tool for a specific specialty and execute it, it gathers every single piece of information about that particular specialty you could ever want to know about and packs it in a cab file. These are some of the Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tools:

� Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tool for Server Clusters
� Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tool - Directory Services Specialty
� Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tool Network
� Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tool (general)

The latter one is a more general one that also does some inventorying on Terminal Services to a log. There's something cool to notice about this log. It is called "tsoc.log" and when you look at it, you will see a lot of mentions of something called "hydraoc". Guess what? Hydra is what the codename was for Microsoft's first incarnation of Terminal Server.

So the Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tools are extremely handy for remote troubleshooting. I've used it on many occasions. I always thought that this was a Microsoft support tool only but seeing as they are offering it for free download, it looks like its free to use. These support tools probably aren't supported though..... (is that a contradiction in terms or what?).

Anyway, be sure to check out all the Microsoft Product Support Reporting Tools.