Taking over the world

People worry about computers becoming really smart and taking over the world. The reality is computers are really stupid and they already have taken over the world.

Microsoft releases the long-anticipated Windows XP SP3

Microsoft has officially announced the availability of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Computer Administrators around the world breath a sigh of relief. Now get to it and update those installation images!

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Windows XP Service Pack 3 Released to Manufacturing

According to Chris Keroack on the Microsoft TechNet forums Windows XP Service Pack 3 was Released to Manufacturing 21 Apr 21, 2008.

It appears that SP3 will be released for download on April 29th via Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center. Automatic Update distribution for home users is set to begin in early summer.

Great news. A freshly imaged Windows XP SP2 computer is currently installing 92 updates from the internal WSUS servers. SP3 is just in time for a large roll out of new computers around here.

If you can't afford to loose it back it up.

I don't remember where I found this little adaptation of "If You're Happy and You Know It," but I never forgot it after reading or hearing it for the first time.

Sung to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It:"

If you can't afford to loose it back it up!
*clap*clap*clap*
If you can't afford to loose it back it up!
*clap*clap*clap*
If you can't afford to loose it
then there's no way to excuse it.
If you can't afford to loose it back it up!
*clap*clap*clap*

Silly maybe, but also true.

Check status of a user's password

Thanks to PCI requirements we recently formalized the the password aging policy in our Active Directory domain and unchecked the Password does not expire flag on all users accounts. I quickly found that I needed a way other than using Active Directory Users and Computers to check to see if a user's password is expired as users ignored the message to change their password.

I also found it helpful to see when the password was last changed and how long until the password expired. It seems the "Your password will expire in X days..." message was causing the odd issue with Outlook Web Access and Entourage (Mac Exchange Client) and having the user change their password resolved the issues.

So instead of always turning to Active Directory Users and Computers, I turned to scripting. Turns out you need the full LDAP distinguished name of the user in order to query password information. Typing in the full DN is a chore, but a bit of searching turned up a method for finding the a DN using the logon name.

And thus a simple script was born.



Script Username prompt.



Script Output.

Download VB Script Code

Force detection on Windows Server Update Services Clients

Common Scenario: You just rebooted your server after installing updates. You know there are still updates the your server doesn't have installed, but the server isn't pulling them down from your Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server. There's not enough time in your maintenance window to go to update.microsoft.com and download the remaining updates, that's why you have a WSUS server in the first place right?

On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 you can force detection by running the command:

%windir%\System32\wuauclt.exe /detectnow

You won't see any immediate results, but within a few minutes the familiar yellow shield should show up in the notification area informing you that updates are being downloaded or that updates have been downloaded and are ready to install.

Even though I'm fairly up to date with updates in my system images and Microsoft Office installs, I still try to run this after imaging a system or installing Microsoft Office just to make sure nothing was missed before handing things over to the customer.

Find and Disable Inactive Computer Objects in Active Directory

I like my Active Directory, or at least the OUs in AD that I manage, to not have stale objects hanging around. Over time computers come and go, but they often leave behind their accounts in your Active Directory. I like to automate things as much as possible, so to go through AD and find inactive computers I wrote a VB Script to find stale computer accounts and disable them for me. As this is a mostly automated process, I wrote the script to update the object description in Active Directory so that it is clear why the computer object is disabled.

View and Download ADInactiveComputers.vbs on GitHub:Gist