I got a question from Mike this week:

“Hi steve. Hope all is well. I am the IT manager at a small bank in Texas. We have lots of patch management tools…so I am not looking for that. Before an audit I would like to quickly force all of my machines to download and install the latest security patches from MS. Is there any way to force Windows to do this from the command line? And I mean like right now! Not next Tuesday. Thanks!”

I came across a script right on Microsoft’s website that can do something close to what you want:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa387102(v=vs.85).aspx

It has a few issues. First, it tries to install all patches. Like the latest version of Internet Explorer, major service packs, and that ridiculous Windows Search 4.0. These require user intervention, and might even break things.

Another issue with the script is that it does not let you know when it failed because the network is down.

We took that script changed it to only include security updates. That way it gets to the core of the issue – getting the latest security patches, without any extra stuff.

With our new version of the script we created a plugin for Network Administrator. This will allow you to remotely install the latest security patches across your network:

If the computer already is up to date, it will say: “This computer is up to date”

You can tell it to just download, or download and install. There is even an option to reboot when the install is complete:

The free version allows you to work with three computers at a time. You can get it from our download page:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/index.php/downloads/

What about that script? If you want to do it yourself without Network Administrator, here is the updated version:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/ForceAU.dat

Just rename it to ForceAU.vbs, and call it like this from the command line:

cscript.exe ForceAU.vbs

Once it starts, it will zoom through and install the latest security patches:

The script, and the plugin work with Windows XP, 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 2008.

It does require administrator access, so if your users have a limited account you will need to either use the task scheduler, group policy, or Network Administrator.

One other thing to note, is that it does not install service packs – So keep that in mind when using the plugin, or the script.

Got a question from Enrico,

“Good morning Steve, and Happy New Year!…I would like that when the user has a wired NIC up and running, the wireless NIC is automatically disabled, and as soon as the wired NIC disconnects, the wireless NIC activates.

This prevents the user to have both NICs up and running at the same time and above all prevents wireless access points to collapse for too many unneeded simultaneous connections.”

Awesome question Enrico.

There are other reasons for wanting this too. If you have both connections running, things like file transfers, or anything that needs the extra speed of Ethernet…might end up going through the wireless instead.

For this question, I have created a VB Script that will receive the names of the two network cards in its command line parameters.

For example, if you look at your network connections:

See the descriptions for them? That is what you will use to identify them.

If you wanted to watch the “Local Area Connection” adapter…and then switch the “Wireless Connection” Adapter, you would call the script like this:

The program will not display anything, but run in the background looking for the change. It will continue to run until the user logs out.

If the Local Area Connection is no longer connected, it will automatically enable the Wireless connection.

The reverse is true…if Local Area Connection becomes available, it will automatically disable the wireless connection.

The best place to run the script would be from a group policy computer configuration logon script (Not a user configuration) because it will run as local system and have the proper permission to enable and disable network cards.

You can get the script from here:

For 2003, Vista, Windows 7, and 2008:
NetSwitch.dat

For Windows XP:

NetSwitchXP.dat

Just rename to NetSwitch.vbs after downloading.

The emails keep coming in. Keep it up

This question is from Steve (Awesome name, love it):

“Hi Steve. We have a piece of software that does not run as a service. It runs like any other application. You launch it and it performs batch processing. The problem is, well, if this application dies over the weekend it causes me a huge headache. It is buggy, crashes at the worst time, and it is needed to batch process items coming in from a web service. My question is, is there any way to automatically restart this app without me coming in to do it myself?”

Excellent question. First of all, you should never have to go into the office to fix a problem. Why aren’t you using a remote admin solution like ours for situations like this?

I know I know, you just want the damn thing to keep running no matter how bad it is

This can be accomplished with a small amount of VB Script. You will probably want to put this into your task scheduler to run at startup, so even if the PC gets rebooted it will automatically start again.

First, we need to see if an app is running. How can we do that?

Lets put some code together to see if notepad.exe is running:

set Service = GetObject ("winmgmts:")

for each Process in Service.InstancesOf ("Win32_Process")
 if Process.Name = sEXEName then
  bRunning=true
 End If
next


The above code will look at all the running processes, and try to find “notepad.exe” if it is active then the variable bRunning will be set to true. If not, then bRunning will be set to false.

We are almost half way there. Now, how do we launch an application from VB Script?

set Shell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

Shell.Run sApplicationPath & sEXEName


Now we have both parts that we need. 1 – Detect if an app is not running, and 2 – Launch of that is true.

Here is the final script:

wend


Don’t copy and paste…download it from here:

ApplicationRestart.dat

Make sure you rename it to .vbs

To change it to fit your needs, fill sApplicationPath and sEXEName with the name and path of the program you want to monitor. Launch it from a logon script, or the task scheduler and you should be good to go.

I have been avoiding it for a long time. I know batch files, and VB script so well that I am not in the mood to learn a totally different scripting language.

As each day passes Microsoft is slowly phasing out their support for VB Script. Eventually Power Shell will be the only way to get admin scripts to run on your Windows Box.

While I was browsing TechNet, I found some great likes that can help you get up to speed:

Getting started with PowerShell 2.0 – A perfect place to start creating your first script.

Piping and The Pipeline – Shows you how to string PowerShell scripts together

Tab Expansion – You have seen it before. Press Tab at the command line and it automatically finishes your thought. Same for PowerShell

Shortcut Keys – Learn how to use keyboard shortcuts that will save you time

Remoting – Run your scripts across the network.

The last one is my fav. Simply because PowerShell makes remote admin so much easier (Once you get it configured).

To get a PowerShell session with a remote computer, type:

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName {HOSTNAME}

Where {HOSTNAME} is the name of the remote computer.

If remote administration is not enabled on the remote machine, you will see an error like this:

Powershell has a built-in command to enable remote admin:

winrm quickconfig

Execute the above command on the remote system, and it will add the proper firewall exceptions for your remote session to get through.

Now, to kill that process – get the remote session open and this command will do the trick:

Stop-Process -processname notepad

It kills any open copy of notepad on the remote system.

Clearly, PowerShell is a whole new experience. Not happy I have to re-learn everything, but it does seem like a few commands can go a long way.

Purchase Network Administrator 2.9 for only $99 per administrator (50% off since you are a reader of my blog), and when it is released you will receive 3.0 Free.
Just follow this special link

We have been hard at work building a new version of Network Administrator, and have been taking many suggestions from you.

Here is a screen shot of the main form:

The first thing we did was make the actions multi-threaded. Currently the system only works on one machine at a time.

Silly as this sounds, it was due to a limitation in the Remote Registry service with threads – We found a way around this problem.

It means you can reboot all of those computers in record time.

Plugins, Plugins, and Plugins. It seems kind of crazy that we did not do this earlier, but the current version of Network Administrator does not have any plugin system. It makes it difficult to add new actions. In our redesign we have added a fantastic plugin system:

Best of all, when you purchase a license, new plugins will be automatically downloaded to you for maximum plugin goodness

What else will you see in the new version? It depends – on you. What plugins would you like to see in 3.0? We will take the top 10 ideas and put them in the final version. Send your ideas to plugins@intelliadmin.com

If you purchase Network Administrator 2.9 today, you will get 3.0 for free. In addition, since you are a valued reader of my blog – you can get it for half price!

Just follow this link

Want to part of the 3.0 beta program? Then Sign up here – We will release our first public beta in about two weeks.

I distributed a test version of Remote Control 4.0 across our network last week, and since it was a special debug version, it created a large number of files named debuglog.dat.

I wanted an easy way to find and delete these using a batch file. I researched and was able to take parts of other scripts to build what I needed.

The first step was to identify all of the local drives on the system. I know that this is available in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\MountedDrives

Using the reg command, I can get this by calling:

reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

And using the find command I can pull out only the devices with dos drive letters:

reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices^|find /i “\DosDevices\”

Still, this is not enough for our task. Here is what we get when calling the script:

Lots of binary data we do not need

We can take this output, and feed it through the “for” command, and call a function for each drive letter:

for /f “tokens=1″ %%x in (‘reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices^|find /i “\DosDevices\”‘) do echo %%x

Now, we get a list of the drives, minus the binary data. We can use that to call a function that will parse out the \DosDevices\

for /f %34tokens=1%34 %%x in (‘reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices^%7cfind /i %34\DosDevices\%34′) do call eleteFileSub %%x
goto endScript eleteFileSub
set LocalDrive=%1
set LocalDrive=%LocalDrive:~-2%
echo %Drive%
goto endScript
:endScript

With that script, we get a complete list of local drives. Hmm…starting to look good:

Now. What next? Well, we want to search each local drive for our file, and then delete it. For safety reasons, I am only going to echo the file names – I want you to think real hard before doing this..since the wrong move and you could wipe out important files.

Again, the ‘for’ command is a great way to do this:

for /f “tokens=1 delims=*” %%z in (‘dir “LocalDrive%\SomeFile.txt” /s /b’) do echo del “%%z”

Replace SomeFile.txt with the file you want to remove.

This will pull out the filename in a full directory search of the specified drive and echo it. If you want to actually delete the file you will need to remove the “echo”:

for /f “tokens=1 delims=*” %%z in (‘dir “LocalDrive%\SomeFile.txt” /s /b’) do echo del “%%z”

Now, putting the whole thing together:

@echo off
for /f “tokens=1″ %%x in (‘reg query HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices^|find /i “\DosDevices\”‘) do call :deleteSub %%x
goto endSub
:deleteSUb
set LocalDrive=%1
set LocalDrive=%LocalDrive:~-2%
for /f “tokens=1 delims=*” %%z in (‘dir “%Drive%\Some File.txt” /s /b’) do echo del “%%z”
goto endSub
:endSub

Text version here if you have copy-paste issues

Make sure you do lots of testing before you pull the trigger and remove the “echo” statement. I wouldn’t want you to blow away the wrong files