Archive for March, 2010
Autopatcher, a Better Way of Staying Updated
Today, another really nifty tool for update deployment. Weather you have a computer that missed a few patches, or a fresh install you are trying to catch up to the rest of your network autopatcher is a easy solution. All you have to do is download a little exe and it will connect to Microsoft.com, and get the latest patches. When you run the application it will automatically determine what you are missing on the computer.  These are automatically selected, then check any add-ons you want to install, and away you go. Now what makes this nifty is once the patches are downloaded once, it works offline. If you have a few computers to update it doesn’t bottle neck your bandwidth. Even better than that it will run off a thumbdrive or a network share and does not require install of the patcher application on the client side. Just another solution when you need to process a update quickly, or update a few computers at a office that is running a low bandwidth WAN. Also it is another substitute to windows update that does not require you to go through the validation process.  It supports windows 2ksp4, vista, server 2003, and xp sp3, in a few different languages and over both X86, and X64 architecture.
http://www.autopatcher.com/
Service Pack 3 Rollout Options Switches and Scripts
Okay so Service Pack 3. Scary I know, I am always weary of big service pack rollouts. However if you don’t update to SP3, you are open to contracting some nasty bugs. Here are some simple install possibilities if you don’t have it on your network yet.  I suggest that you take a look at some of the install articles on SP3 and some of the complications people have experienced before doing a mass rollout.  Below are some options that might be helpful to you, but as always test on a few computers before rolling out to a bunch.  You might also want to check out this link for a explanation of the switches and arguments for installation. In my scripts below the switches I use will force all aplications closed, and do a backup of of the replaced files, and make a log. A progress window is displayed during the install and at the end the computer is rebooted. I found this to be the best option for rollouts as you can see the progress bar to estimate time remaining, and you do have a log and a backup if things go wrong. I suggest you find the right mix of switches that work for you though.
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Inserting a Wait in a Batch File, Using Netstat in a Login Script
So you want to pause a batch file for a few seconds. Unfortunately windows doesn’t provide a very simple way of doing this.  I wanted to run ‘netstat -b’ 25 seconds after a user logged into their computer as to give the computer enough time to start up all background applications. But, there is no wait function in batch files. Well I found a workaround. If you use the ‘-n’ argument with the ping command you can specify the amount of time to run a ping for. Thus ping -n 60 127.0.0.1 will ping your local host for 60 seconds. This will more or less keep the batch file at a standstill for a specified number of seconds before continuing. In my case I used it for a pause in a login script.
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Reset a Local Account Password With VBS
Posted by admin in Kaseya, Scripts, Security, Visual Basic Script (vbs) on March 11, 2010
Today I added a bunch of old computers with different local admin account passwords to our domain. So, since I am all for doing things the easy way I came up with a quick script. I added the computers that I needed the admin account reset on to an active directory OU and applied this script.
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Curling: Installing Adobe Reader With cURL
Don’t worry, you wont need a broom for this.  cURL is a free opensoure, crossplatform, tiny application used for file transfer over urls, and browser emulation form command line.  It is avaliable here http://curl.haxx.se/ .  I happened across this while back while looking for a way to remotely download files from microsoft without user intervention and this has proved to be very useful.  So heres how it works to do a basic download. In this example we are downloading Adobe Reader 9 from adobe.com.
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