The first rant

OK, well this is just the start of this blog. This blog is going to be strictly my rants, raves, and general ramblings about anything tech or geek. Most of it will be revolving around computer networking technology since I am a computer network engineer, but you will also see things like the iPod discussed (no I don't have one yet, but if someone wants to send me one I won't say no!).

The biggest things that I am doing currently are, VBScripting for network administration, and getting Novell eDirectory running on Microsoft Windows and then migrating Netware trees and DirXML over to Windows. I will try to put some pretty good stuff on VBScripting on here so that you can learn what I am learning. Well, OK I will do the same thing for eDirectory since there is like a huge void of documentation for most of that.

Well, one of my biggest complaints with Novell (and I have been a CNE since 1991) is the serious lack of documentation on much of their stuff. It has gotten really bad recently. I was out of the Novell loop for several years and now, trying to get back up to speed, I am getting really frustrated figuring out everything they changed.

VBScript is needed to administer Windows!

Yes, if you really want to be a power administrator you need to learn to script! I have been able to do so much with VBScript in administering the system. How about creating 100 new groups on the system in 10 seconds? That is cool. I did a script where I had a list of groups that I had pulled out of Novell and was able to pump them into the new system in 10 seconds. OK, it took me like 15 minutes to write and test the script, but this is one of the first scripts I did.

One that I did recently that was really cool was a script that pulled a list of all the groups and then pull the list of members in the group and, in a new worksheet for each group, listed the membership in an Excel spreadsheet. We needed it for auditing some rights. I wrote the script to look for the 22 groups that we needed the list from and then was able to send the spreadsheet to the appropriate people. I also found four groups that were created but nobody was ever added to the members list. Delete group!

eDirectory tools for Microsoft are cool

One thing on eDirectory on Microsoft, the maintenance tools are like really cool. Much better than on the NetWare server. If you hate GUI interfaces you will not agree but I really liked them. It did take a while to find where they were. You actually have to go to the Control Panel on the server and then there is a control panel for Novel eDirectory. Odd place to put it but no ones perfect....

Well, I will try to post pretty regularly....