PiqueABoo

At this early stage I wouldn't be suprised if they're doing much more than counting downloads... and given bandwidth increases it's easier for folk to download a big OS now compared to 2000, despite the Vista bloat. I don't care either. Except for logon/off my Windows [whatever] spends most of it's time behind applications where it belongs.

Mmm.. I look after a 10+ year old net forum that by it's nature, tends to attract a more obesssive crowd than usual and we do get a few paranoid folk. One is extreme (meandering tales of plots to kill her) and although it's mildly entertaining at first glance, you have to pity them.. there but for the grace of.. etc.

Did you get that from an MS marketing statement? Consider: "Business" bought 1000 copies of X in the first month "Business" bought 27,123,456 copies of X in the second year "Business" bought 1625 copies of Y in the first month. An increase in a rate doesn't tell us anything much. Maybe, but I've yet to find an app I want to run (lots and lots of those) that doesn't work on my W2K laptop.

I think all they've really said in addition to the painfully obvious "wait a bit until it settles down" that they probably paid Oakleigh a few bob for and no one should need a Becta (as opposed to any IT editorial) to tell them, is that their final report on Vista won't be finished until this time next year, so please don't make it redundant by rushing out and installing it beforehand. And in a year's time you'll likely get "Microsoft... Application Vendor... stability improvements during 2007...." zzzzz... zzzzz... zzzzz

I use that and/or a d-i-y bartpe now. Yes they are very useful and you should have them, but OTOH I rarely need them. If your PCs are locked down then users won't be wrecking them by installing dodgy drivers, services etc... so that mostly leaves abrupt-shutdown-broke-the-registry and you typically need regular sys. state backups updating the contents of %windir\repair to make it worth trying to recover. My most common targets: Abruptly shutdown/crashed servers where you normally do have last-night's registry in repair (or the subdir where BExec put it). Laptops with broken disks containing the only copy of some idiot's work from the last 5 years.

A slight modification just in case what you really wanted was existing Authenticated User ACEs on contact objects changed into ACEs for "my group" ;b var cOldTrustee = "nt authority\\authenticated users"; //must be lower case var cNewTrustee = "DOMAIN\\My Group"; //change this to your domain & group var cADPath = "LDAP://OU=someou,DC=school,DC=internal"; //change this for your AD path ScanOU(GetObject(cADPath)); function ScanOU(oOU) { var e = new Enumerator(oOU); while(!e.atEnd()) { if ( e.item().Class == "contact") ReplaceACE(e.item()); if ( e.item().Class == "organizationalUnit") ScanOU(e.item()); e.moveNext(); } } function ReplaceACE(oC) { var sd = oC.Get("ntSecurityDescriptor"); var dacl = sd.DiscretionaryAcl; var e = new Enumerator(dacl); while(!e.atEnd()) { if (e.item().Trustee.toLowerCase() == cOldTrustee) e.item().Trustee = cNewTrustee; e.moveNext(); } sd.DiscretionaryAcl = dacl; oC.Put("ntSecurityDescriptor",sd); oC.SetInfo(); }

1) H: drive looks as big as their quota. 2) WMI is relatively horrible. 3) This is relatively easy: var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject"); if ( (fso.GetDrive("H:").FreeSpace/fso.GetDrive("H:").TotalSize) < 0.1 ) WScript.Echo("You are approaching your disk quota limit! Blah-blah-blah.."); You need to translate that from JScript.

That's the only place you don't have an explicit name i.e. why didn't you make that: "\\fileserver\home\JLennon06"

Slight diversion.. whatever happened to gizmos like this and recording capabilities (e.g. Creative NJB3 had an optical input)? Did RIAA et al jump up and down on them?

I threw this together mostly via cut-paste from a couple of my ADSI scripts. It's JScript, definitely not production-quality but should work. Change the ADPath to point to your parent OU and run as Admin. var cTarget = "Everyone"; var cADPath = "LDAP://OU=someou,DC=school,DC=internal"; ScanOU(GetObject(cADPath)); function ScanOU(oOU) { var e = new Enumerator(oOU); while(!e.atEnd()) { if ( e.item().Class == "contact") RemoveACE(e.item()); if ( e.item().Class == "organizationalUnit") ScanOU(e.item()); e.moveNext(); } } function RemoveACE(oC) { var sd = oC.Get("ntSecurityDescriptor"); var dacl = sd.DiscretionaryAcl; var e = new Enumerator(dacl); while(!e.atEnd()) { if (e.item().Trustee == cTarget) dacl.RemoveAce(e.item()); e.moveNext(); } sd.DiscretionaryAcl = dacl; oC.Put("ntSecurityDescriptor",sd); oC.SetInfo(); } There's enough there for any competent VBSer to translate, make more efficient, informative, bombproof etc.

Less is more.. if you can do it with one line of batch file then that's usually the way to go. I'd do the one above, but with a "not": if not exist

When I did this the web server cert was the easy bit. The trickier bits were: a) A clunky workaround for single Exchange server (no FE-BE) where you had to fiddle with the Exchange Web-folders via IISM. b) Getting the cert's CA on a variety of gizmos running a variety of Windows Mobile version. Microsoft do have emulators for the last few versions which was very helpful.

The shockwave installer works for me and lots of others. If it doesn't work for you because of your "choices of security settings" that definitely is your problem i.e. the above would be better stated as "adobe will not do your job for you".

One byte to get rid of and: Rewrite in PERL, never mind your VBS go and read a JScript thread, rewrite to use SNMP, go look at DOM. You lot should become a development team at RM ;b

The file does not begin with a space, it begins with 0x00 which is not ASCII text and is a string terminator in most languages. If you can't persuade whatever not to put that on the front, can you sanitise the file before you read it e.g. with the sysinternals strings util: strings -a -q modemstatus.htm > fixedstatus.htm Fixedstatus.htm will definitely be ASCII.

Well.. I claim a background that makes me capable of credibly criticising CC3 at almost any level and: -- The concept is obviously OK: Standard off-the-shelf config & tools mean you can walk up to one and know where most things are. This is not true for D-I-Y Windows systems, most of which you'd likely want to scrap and start again. The implementation is not brilliant: To me it feels like it was strung together by a rolling cast of wannabees learning about to code for NT on the job using whatever techniques they found first on Google (which of course tend to be dated and were dated before CC3 was released). They even let someone run off and write an "engine" which speaks volumes. Delivery of fixes is poor - it's five years old(?) and there are too many tedious gotcha's and workarounds you need to know for routine tasks. Yes, you get security fixes but they're only just getting around to 18 month-old W2K3 SP1 - people are getting burnt now by exotic bugs that MS have long-since fixed. -- RM are working on CC4 now.. will be interesting to see whether a) they've acquired a more serious, professional and coherent approach to their s/w architecture & development, b) they get any better at producing timely bug-fixes. The number of pies RM seem to have their fingers in makes me doubtful that fixes will ever get enough resources, especially a year or two down the line (coders always want to write new stuff, not work on legacy apps). I honestly think the inefficiencies outweigh that. There's just too much obvious admin stuff you can't do quickly unless you write your own scripts|apps to work with their customisations in AD etc.

Oh I had loads of fun trying and failing to pipe and redirect the output of 'find' or 'findstr' to 'set' etc. Suspect my heart is stuck in early DOS days because "for /f.." just feels more complicated.

They did.

There are four timestamps associated with a file: The ones you can see in Explorer [created, modified, accessed] & one associated with the MFT entry that the forensics folk probably don't want you know about. If you have processes automatically reading files (anti-virus scans?), none of those are much use as a "no one has used it for ages" detector. YMMV, but disabling the recording of NTFS last access times certainly can help file system performace - useful if the system spends a lot of time reading lots of folders and little files.

Have an INI file with contents like: Alice=One2Three Bob=Four5Six I want to pick one entry e.g. Bob and put it in an environment variable. This works: for /f "usebackq tokens=2 delims==" %%i in (`findstr Bob file.ini`) do set Bob=%%i Took me a teensy while to arrive there having first failed with other approaches. Has anyone ever got "other approaches" to work or is this pretty much what you have to do?

The other machine I run VMWare on is a dual P-III, currently its a Core 2 Duo... and it works well for me on either. YMMV, but CPU is rarely a bottleneck for me. Disk performance definitely counts though.

FFR, anyone can download WAIK & WinPE 2.0 (Vista) now.

You get headaches either way.. the respective magnitudes depend on your competence versus theirs.. s'no generic answer for that. I imagine genuinely competent people will suffer in consortiums. It's difficult for large organisation to deal with exceptions and they often end up taking away choices that their average "customer" can't handle.

Mildly disappointed.. I keep a Sunbird calander on my laptop and making a penstick copy the "master" would be even better. Exported an ical but unlike a PC copy, portable-Sunbird fails to import it. The splash screens are irksome. [Edit: but you can turn them off in an INI]

Mmm.. I've been oblivious until now and only recently skimmed through the examples in the guide which certainly are dripping with WMI. A lot of it looks like a lure for nix shell-scripters. Dunno about you but I can live without the $'s and all that PGP in one line stuff. PS: I've use jscript and for various reasons would point new scripters to that, but you don't get the same peer support i.e. everyone else and the dog uses VBS.