If you need to move your Windows XP laptop between networks regularly, then you’re no doubt familiar with the hassles of switching your network settings back and forth. If you’re lucky, all of the networks that you connect to use DHCP and it isn’t an issue. However, manual changes are necessary when this isn’t the […]

Documentation is definitely one of the more tedious tasks of system administration. Documents relating to domain controller information used to be rather static; however, with the advent of new functionality in Windows 2003 such as the ability to rename domain controllers and domains themselves, even these documents have become a dynamically changing part of document […]

Have you ever wished that you could add functionality to the graphical tools for managing user or computer objects, but unfortunately didn’t know C++ to write the code? Even if you did had the necessary skills, you would be lucky if the Schema Admins would let you extend the schema in to utilize the new […]

One of the most painful tasks for administrators is keeping track of the service pack level of their servers and workstations. Thankfully, WMI affords a simple and automated method to retrieve this information from computers. Using ADSI to enumerate all machines within a domain, it is extremely simple to automate the WMI query to obtain […]

Many network administrators have heard of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).  Simply put, WMI represents a major change in the way that application applications interact with the Windows family of Operating Systems.  In the past, developers were required to write complicated code to perform even the simplest tasks or collect basic information about computers on the […]

To follow up after the last few articles on VBScript fundamentals, this article contains several different code snippets that can be used with very little modification in any Windows Active Directory environment. This article will focus on scripts and can be used to administer users and groups with ADSI. The final example is a list […]

Before we begin, be forewarned that WMI encompasses A LOT of material and this will be a long article as is required to cover the material at even a high level. I will also preface the article with the fact that many of the diagrams and references included herein were derived from “The Windows Scripting […]

The previous article introduced the fundamental concepts of VBScript. If you are new to scripting and have not yet read this article, you should take a few moments to go over the information contained therein as it explains important fundamentals. This article will take that initial foundation and build on it to illustrate how VBScript […]

This article explains the general basics behind VBScript. Its purpose is to de-mystify VBScript for System Administrators, System Engineers, and anyone else who is interested in writing Windows Script but does not have a background in VB coding.
For many administrators, the thought of writing code throws up an immediate red flag. “That’s not the sort […]

How many times have you been approached by the Network Engineering Group with the news that the internal IP scheme needs to be changed or that VLAN’s are going to be implemented on all switching equipment? The first will require some configuration, but the second can mean large amounts of work to create and configure […]