Windows Admin Scripting Little Black Book

Chapter 1: The Essentials of Scripting This chapter introduces the basic techniques of scripting and the three major scripting tools used throughout this book: Shell Scripting, KiXtart, and Windows Script Host. By the end...

Chapter 2: Scripting Workstation Setups In Brief In this chapter you'll learn the quickest methods to automate hard disk setups and images. You'll begin learning the secrets of Microsoft FDISK and how to create parti...

Chapter 3: Scripting Installations and Updates In Brief In the previous chapter, you learned how to automate hard disk setups and images. Throughout this chapter, you will use various scripting methods to create uniq...

Chapter 4: File Management In Brief Files are the backbone of any information system. They hold the data you work with and make up the programs you use. As a computer user, everything you do involves interacting with...

Chapter 5: Automating Windows and Applications In Brief In this chapter, you will first learn how to script applications, Control Panel applets, and Windows and Wizards from the command line. You will then learn abou...

Chapter 6: Inside the Registry In Brief Most administrators go out of their way to avoid working with the registry, and I don't blame them. The registry is one of those aspects of Windows you are constantly being war...

Chapter 7: Local System Management In Brief It's such a shame. You spend months creating the perfect drive image for your company, only to have users and fellow administrators destroy it little by little through inst...

Chapter 8: Remote System Management In Brief Remote management is essential to becoming a good administrator. When you're working at a site with 300 or more systems, visiting and updating every single system becomes...

Chapter 9: Enterprise Management In Brief Corporations spend millions of dollars a year on packaged applications and manpower to keep their computing environments running like finely tuned engines. Although most thir...

Chapter 10: Managing Inventory In Brief Managing inventory in an enterprise is an extremely involved task. Although several expensive inventory management packages are available, many companies cannot afford to purch...

Chapter 11: Security In Brief As sad as I am to admit this, the attitude of most administrators is "security through obscurity." This expression means that the best way of dealing with security holes is ignoring them...

Chapter 12: Logging and Alerting In Brief The purpose of logging is to record the status of an operation generated by the system or an application. Along with many scripts and applications, Windows 2000/XP/2003 has a...

Chapter 13: Logon Scripts In Brief A logon script is a script that runs automatically each time a user logs on to the network. This script can contain various commands or programs that process on the local station, s...

Chapter 14: Backups and Scheduling In Brief Most companies and people couldn't continue to be in business or do their work if all their data were lost. Backups provide an easy method to restore a system or a set of f...

Chapter 15: Fun with Multimedia In Brief If you're not having complete and utter fun yet, this chapter is for you. In this chapter, you will learn how to use simple scripts to play and control multimedia files. You w...

Chapter 16: Special Scripting for Windows XP and 2003 In Brief It seems a new operating system comes out almost every year. While the constant upgrading, bugs, and change makes support more difficult, the new and imp...