I see a lot of posts about BGInfo from SysInternals and using it on your servers to make them easily identifiable.
Although BGInfo can show you a wealth of information, it’s not the most beautiful of wallpapers, and yes I know you can spend a day or two using the GUI tool to customize the way it looks, but it’s just too much effort for something that is supposed to just be telling you what server you are logged on to.
For this reason, I always use BackInfo on any server I touch. BackInfo came out of the Resource Kit Tools for either Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003, I can’t remember which. For this, you get two files: backinfo.exe and backinfo.ini.
For the simplest installation running out of the box, do the following:
- Copy the two files to inDir/li>
- Open a Command Prompt
- Type inDir0ackinfo.exe to launch it for the first time
- Type reg add HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun /v BackInfo /t REG_SZ /d inDirbackinfo.exe to add BackInnfo to the registry so that it runs for everyone at logon.
A nice idea for someone wanting to enforce this background across a corporate environment would be to create a logon script in a Group Policy Object at the parent OU which holds all your servers. In the logon script, push the two files and the registry setting down to the servers. Then, just as the little cherry on top, to stop people trying to get away from BackInfo, you could assign a User Configuration policy which enforces the background wallpaper as backinfo.bmp, which is the file produced by BackInfo.
If you like to see other information, you want to change the font or anything like that, you can just edit the backinfo.ini file you copied over to do all sorts of things. The file is really well commented which makes it easy to do also.