Your Solutions - Add/Remove Components over the Network
Ryan Fitzsimmons (Edmonton, Alberta) |
Adding and Removing Windows Components over the network
Your Solutions is another new series on the CanITPro blog where we will be highlighting IT Pro's across Canada who have come up with innovative ways to manage their Windows environment. The first article was written by Ryan Fitzsimmons
--------------------------------------------------
Network monitoring tools are ubiquitous within the I/T industry today and the SNMP protocol is generally a must to utilize them. The only problem is that if you haven’t deployed SNMP on your desktops, how do you install the protocol without having to go client to client to install manually? Scripting is the obvious answer, but then you face the issue of windows looking for a cd, more specifically the i386 directory. The simple solution is to go from machine to machine installing SNMP. Which is fine with only a few clients. But what happens in an environment of 50 or 100+, it’s simply not a viable solution. So how do you script out the installation of SNMP?
The first step is to create an Unattended file (.UA. To install SNMP and WMI SNMP the UA file looks like this.
[NetOptionalComponents]
SNMP = 1
WBEMSNMP = 1
Now to fix the registry you need to alter two values and export the entire Key ‘setup’
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup]
"SourcePath"=" \\\\server\\share\\ xpsetupfiles"
"ServicePackSourcePath"=" \\\\server\\share\\ xpsetupfiles"
Note: Of course this assumes you’ve uploaded the windows install files onto a shared folder.
Now, create the code to call the add/remove components function. Note that it calls the file created earlier and reg key from the network.
regedit /S \\server\\share \SNMP.reg"
sysocmgr /i:%windir%\inf\sysoc.inf /u\\server\\share \snmp.ua /x /q
Assuming end users are local administrators, then the batch file will execute without problems. Of course if the opposite is true then you will need to find a different method to execute the registry changes, whether it’s via group policy, or a third party tool. In our case, we used desktop authority and simply ran the bat file as an admin.
Of course this can be used to add or remove any windows component following the instructions here.
--------------------------------------------------
Ryan Fitzsimmons is an IT Professional living in Edmonton, Alberta working primarily with Microsoft technologies. When he isn't working on server issues or dealing with end user issues, he is being assigned more fun and exciting tasks by co-worker and fellow guest blogger Colin Harford.