User management for Windows machines can be complicated and convoluted sometimes. Because pretty much everything I do is to make life easier for me, I decided to write some basic functions that can reliably add, delete, change passwords and simply check to see if a particular user exists. I had a couple of requirements when … Read more
VBScript is a great language for management of Windows servers and desktops. The fact that Windows has built in interpreters for it makes it a really handy language for everything from gathering data to managing users to installing applications. One cool feature about VBScript is that Windows has 2 built in interpreters. One is called … Read more
For the last week or so I have struggled to get database mirroring with failover (failover being a witness machine) working as advertised from Microsoft. After struggling with error messages like this for the past few days: 2007-07-06 15:50:44.62 spid31s Error: 1474, Severity: 16, State: 1. 2007-07-06 15:50:44.62 spid31s Database mirroring connection error 2 ‘Connection … Read more
XML data sources are more and more important today. From RSS feeds to SOAP to eCommerce based applications. The ability to send and retrieve XML from a web application can be critical. Thankfully ASP has the ability to read from an HTTP data stream via a COM object from Microsoft called “ServerXMLHTTP” which facilitates the … Read more
In ASP there is a really easy way to include existing files in your scripts. There is a simple “include file” or “include virtual” statement you can use to add functionality that is in other files that you have written. Well there was really no equivalent functionality in VBScript until VBScript 5.0 was released. When … Read more
This particular function will count the number of occurrences of a string within a SQL column. I can’t really take credit for this particular SQL function, I actually found it in an obscure post on SQL-Server-Performance.com. But I thought the usefulness of it so great that I’d post and share it. The advantage of this … Read more
While Googling around the other day I noticed that lots of people are searching for a way to FTP files with VBScript. After looking for a while at the solutions to do this, it was clear that no real easy, free way of FTP uploading and downloading files was currently available. There are downloadable components … Read more
Necessity is the mother of invention as they say. Today I had to write a couple of scripts to translate DNS names into IP addresses and vice versa. Since there is no easy way to do this in VBScript, I whipped up two (well three) quick little functions that use the nslookup command to preform … Read more
A couple of months ago I posted an entry about zipping and unzipping files with 7zip and VBScript. The script works well and I use it quite frequently and I definitely recommend it over WinZip if you have a choice. I ran into a situation for a client where they needed a scripting solution but … Read more
I haven’t written in quite some time, but I thought I’d take some time this morning to share a little tidbit of information that I found quite handy. Every once in a while I’ll dock my laptop or log into a machine that had been in use via remote desktop and a window will be … Read more