ps3cheats

Question: I work in a K-12 educational school district that consists of an environment where the desktops in local work groups, belong to a NT4 domain and belong to a 2003 active directory. We have to start planning and deploying Novell ZENworks to ensure we can better manager our desktops. These computers (18,000+) do not have a consistant local administrator password.

Does anyone have an idea how to solve this problem without having to visit each machine physically?

ps3cheats

The first bacth script you need is one that will go through the list and call another script to process each PC:

REM -------------------------------------------------
REM Process all computers in a list
REM list consists of a text file with a PC name (or IP address) on each line)
REM call process.cmd with computer name as paramter for each computer listed
REM --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FOR /F %%c in (computers.txt) DO call process.cmd %%c
REM -------------------------------------------------

Next you need a batch script called process.cmd to perform actions on each PC:

REM -------------------------------------------------
REM Check host on the network, end if not.
ping -n 1 %1 >nul
if errorlevel 1 goto notthere
net use \\%1 /USER:Administrator password1
if not errorlevel 1 goto connected
net use \\%1 /USER:Administrator password2
if not errorlevel 1 goto connected
net use \\%1 /USER:Administrator password3
if not errorlevel 1 goto connected
echo %1 : No passwords accepted
goto end
:connected
echo %1 : Connected successfully
REM What to do once connected to the PC with the correct password goes here.
goto end
:notthere
echo %1 : Host not contacted
:end
REM -------------------------------------------------

This second script should ping the machine to check it's on the network, then try and connect using one of three passwords for Administrator. Once connected it can perform required actions (not yet specified in the script). It should report the outcome for each PC in the list so you know what it managed to do for each PC.

This script isn't complete as I've not yet found the command to reset the administrator's command remotely, I'm sure it must be possible so I'll come back when I found this out. In the meantime at least this script give you something to test to verify what I've given so far works okay. I've based this on existing scripts for Windows XP systems, so it has a good chance of working okay first time, let me know if there are any problems so far.