TechnicallyChris.com

For those who are unaware, there is a monitoring and reporting systems for modern hard disks known as SMART. I’ll save the explanations for Wikipedia’s S.M.A.R.T. page. Instead of my normal big script example, I’d like to provide you with a snippet that basically just loops over the known data from WMI using AutoIt. You can modify this however you’d like to return error codes if failures are found, write out to logs, etc.

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Chris Random Code Scripts

I was recently tasked with adjusting the DCOM Security Settings (DCOM: Machine Access Restrictions and DCOM: Machine Launch Restrictions) in the local security policy on a number of computers. These can be changed manually by opening the Local Security Policy and browsing to Local Policies and then Security Options, but it needed to be more automated than that and needed to be rolled out to a few hundred Windows XP Computers.

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Chris Random Code

I’ve updated my Microsoft Excel PingCell code that I wrote for this post. The new function returns all results from Win32_PingStatus back to Excel. You can now ping and choose the results you’d like to see returned (example below code). The Win32_PingStatus class is documented on Microsoft’s Website.

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Chris Random Code Microsoft Office, VBA

I created the following function to create Microsoft SMS 2003 Client Configuration Requests from within Excel and dump them all out into a temporary directory for me to copy to the SMS inbox. For those that are unaware, you can “ask” SMS 2003 to remotely install the client by putting a CCR file into the INBOXES\CCR.BOX folder on the SMS Site server.

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Chris Random Code Microsoft Office, SMS 2003, VBA

Oddly enough, I often find myself needing to ping a list of computers from Excel. Usually it’s part of some asset management or software deployment exercise. If it’s a small list, I’ll often do it manually. Medium and larger lists usually warrant some type of batch file hitting the list and I just keep an eye on the results or have them pipe back to a text file. Recently I developed an Excel sub that would do the work for me and then return the results back to a column for me to sort and filter by.

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Chris Random Code Microsoft Office, VBA

I frequently find myself needing to create lists of values I have in Excel in one cell. For example, I might get have a column of IDs and I need to create a comma delimited list of them to put into a SQL Query. I have the following function I put in an XLA that loads with Excel to generate these lists.

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Chris Random Code VBA