Script to deploy activeX controls in active directory without logging in as an admin

So my company has decided to deploy an Electronic Medical Record (or EMR for those of us in the medical IT field) that is web-based. In the vendor's infinite wisdom, they wrote the software as an activeX that (obviously) is IE only AND requires administrative privileges to install the activeX. Talk about bad programming. So this brings us to my dilemma of how to get this install on my PCs automatically. It is impractical to go to each PC and install the activeX. If the programmers would have made a real application its easy and built in to AD to deploy an MSI (or an EXE converted to MSI). I couldn't find anything on the internet how to deploy activeX controls with active directory, so here is my 2 cents:

This script relies on AutoIT version 3 available at http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/ which is a great, easy to use scripting language and compiler.

The script is available for download here:

Text Version

AU3 uncompiled verson

As always, thanks for using my scripts! Feel free to email me any cool ideas for scripts you have and I'll do my best!

Dan

Carter's First Christmas and New Years

Carter met Great-Grandma and Grandpa Lewis and Great-Grandma Heatwole on December 5, 2010. He's been growing fast since then. We went to Rockford for Christmas, where he met Uncle Mike and Aunt Linnea, along with all of Michele's extended family. For New Years Eve, we went to the "Get Lit" walk at the East Peoria Festival of Lights at Fondulac Park with Grandma and Grandpa Penning. This year at the Penning Christmas, we had a wrapping paper outfit competition. Carter didn't win, but he was still pretty darn cute!

Introducing Carter Penning!

Carter has arrived! Michele started to feel contractions at around 5:30 on Friday while we were eating dinner at the Olive Garden with my parents. We went to the hospital after dinner and Michele was admitted at 8:30. After pushing for two hours the doctor said that he thought it would be best if a C section was done. Carter Jacob Penning was born at 3:58 AM on November 27, 2010 at OSF St Francis. Carter weighed 7lbs 7.4oz when he was born. He is a healthy (and very hungry!) baby boy. Michele was very tired after laboring for so long and then going through surgery. Michele is doing fine as well. We were able to leave the hospital today, November 29th. We want to thank everyone for their support and prayers, we really appreciate it!

Program to Cycle Old Removable Backup to Disk (B2D) Symantec Backup Exec 12 IMG Folders

I've been using Symantec Backup Exec 12 for a while now and have run into a really annoying problem that is has with removable backup to disk folders. Symantec Backup Exec 12 doesn't recycle the older IMG folders that store the backed up data in them correctly. It eventually just fills up the removable disk and makes it unusable until you manually (or with this program) delete the older backup files. One symptom of the disks filling up is a Backup Exec error showing insufficient disk space.

Depending on your backup sets and number of B2D devices, you may want to adjust the number of months that backup images are stored. This is written for a full backup size of approximately 300GB and a 500GB uncompressed drive capacity. This is written for IMG folder numbers of less than 100000 which is approximately 10 years of daily backups. If you have been using this longer than that, get a new version of Backup Exec that hopefully can append/overwrite/delete old B2D folders correctly.

You can add this as a scheduled task on your Backup Exec server. This program was written with AutoIT version 3... AutoIT is a very easy to use scripting/programming language that offers many prewritten functions that are very useful to IT administrators. More info at AutoITScript.com.

AutoIT Script File (editable): Download

Compiled .exe for drive path "F:\": Download

Please leave a comment or ask a question!

PowerShell Script to Notify Users and Admins of Expired or ExpiringPasswords

Throughout my daily system administrator tasks I have found that an overly large portion of calls are due to password resets that could be avoided had the user reset his/her own password in time.  The script scans Active Directory for accounts that are both enabled and have a password expiration date set and then notifies the users (and administrator) when the user has X days (defined by a variable in the script) remaining to reset his/her password. The notification email to the end user also includes a link to the Exchange 2007 OWA password reset page.

The script is dependant on Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagementsnapin to get the AD attributes. The Quest.ActiveRoles.ADManagement snapin can be downloaded from 'PowerShell Commands (CMDLETs) for Active Directory by Quest Software'  that is available for download here: http://www.quest.com/powershell/activeroles-server.aspx. Look for ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory (both32-bit or 64-bit versions available)

There are two versions:

Notify both the end user(s) and administrator - Download

Notify only the administrator - Download

Please leave a comment!

San Diego Trip

Michele and I just got back from San Diego and it was awesome! Check out the photos....

[postcasa size=large]http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/epdp14/albumid/5329114177319146529?alt=rss&kind=photo&hl=en_US[/postcasa]

You can also view all of the photos here.

Better pictures of the tank

Melissa, my sister-in-law, brought her camera over today and I was able to take much clearer pictures of the tank. Not all of them are the best, but at least you can see most of my corals now!

[gallery link="file"]