When using Symantec System Center, you are sometimes unable to retreive information from your remote clients. This is because something is stopping communications between the AntiVirus Server and the Client workstation. If you are running Active Directory, you can easily configure a Group Policy to allow these types of communications.
Remote assistance is a new feature available in the Windows XP Operating Systems. This can be very useful in offering assistance to your remote clients because it allows you to see the users desktop while they are using it, therefore allowing you to be able to walk them through how to do something. This article describes how to set up remote assistance in an Active Directory enviroment.
Remote Desktop allows remote administrators to log in remotely to manage a workstation. In some cases you may need to enable Remote Desktop remotely. As opposed to manually setting registry key on hundreds of of PC you can easily accomplish this via Windows Group Policy.
Microsoft Windows offers a built in tool for defragmenting your hard drives. Sometimes it can be hard to defragment many hard drives on remote machines regularly without the help of 3rd party tools. The following is a visual basic script which will allow for this.
One thing Microsoft leaves out of its Group Policies is the ability to configure mapped network drives and network printers. I guess Microsoft assumes that we all know how to write scripts to do these things. Here is a script that will retreive group membership from Active Directory and map your drives and printers accordingly based on the information in the csv file.
Recently I needed to take a survey of one of my clients sites to determine which service pack versions were running on the machines. As opposed to going to each pc or running some bulky software, I came across a script which will read hostnames off a text file and output the XP Service Pack versions of the machines on the network. This is a quick way to find your service pack versions of your network XP machines
