Cisco Console Madness!

Recently I did some hardware upgrades to our backbone, replacing aged 2600 routers with 2800 series.  Durring this process, I re-arranged our VLANS a bit and concequently had to move our Cisco WAPs to the new VLAN.  Now with 8 APs spread across a building and some high enough to need a SkyJack to access the console this could have beena  time consuming process.  Luckly I had an ace up my sleve.  Durring the initial install of the APs, I had our wireing company run 2 drops per device, one for Ethernet, the other for the console.

Long story short, I was standing next to the patch pannel programming each AP and thinking this would be a great standard practice for all of our CISCO devices.  Food for thought~

Automated inventory care of SIW

Due to a recent change in software, I needed to upgrade RAM in all of the older machines in the organization.  To aid me in upgrading 300+ PCs I thought it prudent to make a list of what hardware each PC had.  I have used many inventory tools in the past (the most prominent being SpiceWorks) but by far the best inventory tool I have used is SIW.  This software comes in both free and paid versions, the paid having more features.  The feature that caught my eye for the paid version was the ability to use command line to control SIW.  After reading through the documentation, I made this small script that will e-mail the results of the scan to a inventory e-mail address.

@ECHO OFF
set INPUT=
set /P INPUT=The owner of this PC is: %=%
CLS
echo Creating and sending %INPUT%’s System Report.  Please Waitsiw /log=”%INPUT%” /email=INVENTORY EMAIL ADDRESS/subject=”%INPUT%’s report” /smtp=EMAIL SERVER /silent /nologo
CLS
CLS
ECHO %INPUT%’s Report is sent
Pause

This script allows the user to input their name, which in turn becomes the name of HTML file containing system specs along with the subject of the e-mail.  This batch file also requires the SIW.exe and SIW.lic file along with it to work.  So I threw it all togeather using freeextractor and created an install file.  Keep an eye out on making install files with freeextractor soon!

References:

http://www.gtopala.com/ – SIW
http://freeextractor.sourceforge.net/FreeExtractor/ – FreeExtractor

Clearing out corrupt print jobs REDUX

Quick update to clearing out print jobs.  Got a call this morning from a user who repeatedly gets jobs stuck in their print queue.  To help reduce his calls, I wrote this quick batch and put it on his desktop.

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Repairing Printer… Please wait….
Net stop spooler
del /Q c:\windows\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start spooler
cls
ECHO Please powercycle your printer
ECHO …
ECHO Printer is repaired
pause

Try it out!

Chris Control

Chris Control was the answer to my Prayers when I had a PC that would not connect through RDP.  ChrisControl is an all in one client that uses both RDP and VNC.  The neat thing about ChrisControl is if you know the admin account, it can remotely connect to the PC, install a VNC server and connct to it… No configuration Required!  And to complete the puzzle it also removes VNC from the remote PC when you close the session, making your PC secure once again.  This works great in our environment where not every PC is on the AD, and has the advantage both the tech and user to access the same screen at the same time.

Oh, and did I mention it also does WOL for those PCs who are powered down?

Heres the download link! http://www.chall.plus.com/winpe/

Gotta small HDD? Running out of space? Spacemonger to the Rescue!

Ever have a clien that complains about running out of space on their Hard drive?  Instead of spending all that time going through directories and finding out where the junk is, check out Spacemonger.  This tool will scan hard drives on your PC and display it in a nice graphical fashion.  As you can see in the screenshot, I took a quick scan of the recovery drive on my laptop.

Spacemonger comes in 2 versions, the Paid and free version.  Personally I like the free version better.  Its small and does everything I need it to.  As an added bonus, it dosnt require an install, so I can take it along with me on a USB key or leave it up on the tools shared drive at the dealership.

Heres the Product link http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

You may have to do some digging around for the download link.  Its on the download page, under free software at the bottom of the list.

Using Taskkill to kill muliple instances of Outlook.exe

Ever run across a PC where outlook wont open, and the user has clicked on it about 50 times.  Lone behold when you open task manager there is actually 50 instances of outlook.exe running.  Instead of clicking “end task” for each of these, just open your friendly command prompt and type in this command

taskkill /IM “outlook.exe” /f

This will kill all of your outlook.exe’s forcefully.