Posts Tagged Kaseya
All about the Shutdown Command
The ability to restart and shutdown computers automatically or remotely is key to completing installs, fixing issues, or just having a hell of a time messing with end users. In this post ill detail all the switches and uses of the shutdown command.
For anyone that is not familiar with the command ‘shutdown’, it is a windows/dos function that controlls the the shutdown, logoff and restart of a compiter or server either locally or remotely.
Here are the switches
Change Windows Firewall From Command Line or Batch File
I have a set of scripts I run when I prep a computer for deployment. At specific points applications require that the windows firewall be turned off in order to install correctly. This is namely ACT! and imagine time. They use a bunch of odd ports during install, so their documentation tells you to just turn off the firewall. Well here is what I found with a little research. From run or in a batch file there is a simple netsh command to disable the firewall and one to again enable it.
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Automatically Remove Windows Search 4.0
Microsoft has a funny way of sneaking ‘features’ in with patches. In this case Windows Search 4.0 is not really a feature as much as a problem. It was installed on a few of the networks I support as part of our weekly patching, and the next day I got a bunch of calls about reduced performance. I figured that people would complain until it finished indexing. Not the case, it seemed to cripple computers and crush servers. It indexed to the point of actually leaving no resources for users to authenticate to one of our terminal servers. I started looking for a fix and came up with this:
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Make a Local User Account With VBS
Posted by admin in Kaseya, Scripts, Visual Basic Script (vbs) on March 18, 2010
I deployed a bunch of new computers to a network using terminal services. Since the real authentication is at the server we standardize the local computer login to the username user1 and the password user1, just to keep things simple. So I needed a easy way to create this account locally on 30+ workstations. Here is what I came up with:
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Remotely Enable Remote Desktop
This is for those ‘oh shit’ times when you can’t get to a computer when you need to. If you can get to the remote registry of a computer, you can change this key to allow RDP access to the computer, even if the box is not checked.
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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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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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