Thanks for buying the Windows Server 2008 Portable Command Guide: MCTS 70-640, 70-642, 70-643, and MCITP 70-646, 70-647 . I’d love to say that this book was my idea, but the real credit goes to Scott Empson who originally developed the vision of this book with Cisco certifications. I’ve worked with Scott and Pearson Education to help bring the same type of books he created for Cisco products to professionals working on Microsoft products. Scott’s vision started with the idea that many IT professionals who have already learned the theory still sometimes need help remembering how to implement it.

The book doesn’t go into depth teaching these concepts. The idea is that you already understand them. Instead, the goal is to provide enough information to help you remember what you can do and how to do it. The book is purposely written to be a small, portable, and useful journal, not an encyclopedic-sized volume. However, even if a concept is new to you, there’s enough information for you to start typing at the command prompt to gain a better understanding.

As an example, you probably know that you can force the registration of SRV records in DNS by stopping and restarting a specific service. However, you might not remember the specific commands are net stop netlogon and net start netlogon . You might remember that you have to join a Server Core computer to a domain using the netdom command, but you might not remember the full syntax off the top of your head. In other words, you know the theory behind why you’d stop and restart the netlogon service and why you have to join a Server Core computer to a domain from the command prompt, but you might not always remember the syntax. This book is a ready reference of useful commands and procedures with clear-cut examples. It shows the exact syntax of many of the commands needed for administrative tasks performed regularly by Windows Server 2008 (and Windows Server 2008 R2) administrators.

I started the outline of this book by ensuring that command prompt commands covered by the Microsoft Certified Information Technology Professional (MCITP) certifications on Windows Server 2008 were included. This includes the 70-640, 70-642, 70-643, 70-646, and 70-647 exams for the MCITP Server Administrator and MCITP: Enterprise Administrator certifications. I then added the commands I’ve found valuable in my dayto- day work on networks and from classroom teaching.

Many IT professionals use an engineering journal to help them remember key information needed on the job. It might include specific commands that they sometimes forget, IP addressing schemes used on their networks, steps for important maintenance tasks that are performed infrequently, or anything else they want to easily recall by looking at the journal. If you already have an engineering journal of your own, you can add this as a Windows Server 2008 addendum. If you don’t have one, you can start with this book. It includes the same “Create Your Own Journal Here” appendix that Scott uses in the Cisco series. There are blank pages you can use to add your own notes and make this your journal, not mine.