Recently I was tasked with synchronizing directories between two different servers. Because files can change, become corrupted or otherwise altered without changing any of their attributes, it was pretty essential to ensure that these files were exactly the same. There are a few utilities out there that can do this for you but one of … Read more VBScript MD5Hash and IsHex Functions to Calculate MD5 File Hashes

I had been using a simple script to create an alpha numeric password that was all lower case for quite some time. Recently though I decided to give the old password creation function an overhaul since the old password creation function was very weak. This new function will create a new string that is alpha … Read more Create a Strong Random Password with VBScript

Zipping and UnZipping files is a very common task in Windows. Probably one of the more popular search terms that bring people to my site. I have already written two articles on how to zip and unzip files in Windows. The first article discussed how to zip and unzip using 7Zip. 7Zip is a popular … Read more Zip and UnZip Files Using the Windows Shell and VBScript

I was recently tasked with changing the IP address for the host headers of an IIS 5 machine. This is a pretty common task as machines are physically relocated; sites are moved from IP to IP address or network to network. Although this task is simplistic and pretty straight forward to do through the IIS … Read more IISChangeIP.vbs – Mass IP Address Change and Configuration Tool For IIS

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 Local User and Group Management with VBScript and ADSI

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 Check Which VBScript Interpreter You Are Executing Your Script With

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 MSSQL 2005 Database Mirroring With Certificates

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 GetXML Function – Send and Retrieve XML in ASP or VBScript

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 VBScript Includes – How to Add an Existing Script with a Simple Include Statement

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 Counting and Sorting Occurrences of a String in SQL