I’ve been having a problem accessing my logon scripts through the Group Policy Management console. I would open the policy that the the script was associated with, drill down to the logon scripts and click show files. I’d get a window with all of the logon script associated with that Policy, but when i would right click the .vbs file, it would tell me I don’t have access. logons would process the script correctly, so it wasn’t that the policy was corrupt.

it turns out that it appears it is a result of Internet Explorer’s enhanced security in Server 2003. Knowledge base article 815141 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815141)covers the enhanced security, but what we’re particularly interested in is about a third of the way down where it talks about security zones:

Access to scripts, executable files, and other files on Universal Naming Convention (UNC) shared folders is restricted unless the shared folder is added to the Local intranet zone explicitly.

so I went into Internet Explorer, Tools -> Internet Settings, Security tab. clicked on Local Network, and then sites. I added \\mydomain.int to the list and now i can edit the logon scripts through GPMC.

One of the lovely students here was found to have our local admin password, something that inevitably seems to happen every other year. How he got it is a discussion for another post which will include what measures we put in place to try and keep it from happening again.

The more immediate concern is how do we change the local password on 1000+ computers without having to visit each one? I’ve written a vbscript that takes a comma-delimited file with the first column being the IP and the second being the Computer name and outputs two lists, one that were changed & one that were not. I got the input file from our DHCP Server by exporting the Scope for the building where the password was compromised. I then got rid of the other columns that I didn’t care about. I also broke the file down into smaller chunks just to make it more manageable and so that I could send information to the building tech on the computers that failed in smaller batches.

The script I wrote takes this file as input (c:\script\workstations.txt) and spits back out two files (c:\script\Done.txt & c:\script\NotDone.txt) Done contains the computers that the script was able to contact and changed the local admin password on and NotDone has the ones we were unable to contact and therefore were not changed.

I don’t want to claim this all as my own, so I did borrow the IsAlive function from another post I found. If I can find it again, I will link to that post.

Option Explicit

Dim fso, user, ts, temp, src, WshShell, PINGFlag, ComputerArr
Dim dstGood, dstBad, tsGood, tsBad
Set fSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
src = "c:\script\workstations.txt"
dstGood = "c:\script\Done.txt"
dstBad = "c:\script\NotDone.txt"

If Not fso.FileExists(src) Then
WScript.Echo "File: " & src & " cannot be found."
WScript.Quit
End If

Set ts = fso.OpenTextFile(src,1)
Set tsGood = fso.OpenTextFile(dstGood,2)
Set tsBad = fso.OpenTextFile(dstBad,2)
Do Until ts.AtEndOfStream
	temp = ts.ReadLine
	ComputerArr = split(temp, ",")
	if isalive(ComputerArr(0)) then
		wscript.echo "Ping Success: " & ComputerArr(1)
		Set user = GetObject("WinNT://" & ComputerArr(0) & "/Administrator,user")
		user.setpassword "YourNewPassword"
		user.setinfo
		tsGood.writeline ComputerArr(1)
	else
		wscript.echo "Ping Failed: " & ComputerArr(1)
		tsBad.writeline ComputerArr(1)
	End IF
Loop

Function IsAlive(strHost)
    Const OpenAsASCII = 0
     Const FailIfNotExist = 0
     Const ForReading =  1
     Dim objShell, objFSO, sTempFile, fFile
    Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
     Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
    sTempFile = objFSO.GetSpecialFolder(2).ShortPath & "\" & objFSO.GetTempName
    objShell.Run "%comspec% /c ping.exe -n 2 -w 500 " & strHost & ">" & sTempFile, 0 , True
    Set fFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(sTempFile, ForReading, FailIfNotExist, OpenAsASCII)
    Select Case InStr(fFile.ReadAll, "TTL=")
         Case 0
            IsAlive = False
         Case Else
            IsAlive = True
    End Select
    fFile.Close
     objFSO.DeleteFile(sTempFile)
    Set objFSO = Nothing
    Set objShell = Nothing
End Function

We all have them, those applications where they perform a backup periodically and place the backup inside the programs folder structure. this is great if you’re trying to recover from a problem within the application, but what about if the hard drive goes? and most of the time, the program just keeps dumping backups and doesn’t clean up old ones.

I wrote this script to handle these two problems. At the beginning of the code you can modify strsrc and srdst to be the source(strsrc) and destination(strdst) that you need for your application. You can also set the age variable to be the number of days you want to retain backups in each directory for.

As always, I don’t claim that my code is pretty, just that it works. feel free to modify or comment on it.

import shutil, os, stat, time
from datetime import date, timedelta

strsrc = "c:\\program files\\Application\\backup"
strdst = "S:\\bkup"
age = 14

strDeleteFromDate = date.today() - timedelta(days=age)

for files in os.walk(strsrc):
	for item in files[2]:
		strFileLoc = strsrc + "\\" + item
		strdateused = os.stat(strFileLoc).st_mtime
		year, day, month = time.localtime(strdateused)[:3]
		strLastUsed = date(year, day,month)
		if strLastUsed < strDeleteFromDate:
			print "/* ", item, ",", strLastUsed, ", Delete */"
			os.remove(strFileLoc)
		else:
			print "/* ", item, ",", strLastUsed, ", Keep */"
			shutil.copy2(strFileLoc, strdst)

for contents in os.walk(strdst):
	for things in contents[2]:
		strFileLoc = strsrc + "\\" + things
		strdateused = os.stat(strFileLoc).st_mtime
		year, day, month = time.localtime(strdateused)[:3]
		strLastUsed = date(year, day,month)
		if strLastUsed < strDeleteFromDate:
			print "/* ", item, ",", strLastUsed, ", Delete bkup */"
			os.remove(strFileLoc)
		else:
			print "/* ", item, ",", strLastUsed, ", Keep bkup */"