On our network, we have quite a few computers that have Adobe Acrobat Standard installed on them. Unfortunately, we don’t know which ones match what serial numbers. So I set out to find out how.
Category Archives: Coding
Nortel CallPilot LDAP Lookup
Where I work right now, they use a Nortel phone system. For voicemail, they use CallPilot. The CallPilot system happens to be on the network, which is rather intriguing. For the department I am in, we use an Asterisk phone system that talks to the Nortel. I’ve always wondered however if there was an phone directory of the extensions. I was told no. So I did some digging. I happened across and LDAP server running on the CallPilot system. After some hacking, I discovered that the LDAP system had all the names in it (outdated of course). Two caveats though: it is only the extensions which have voicemail and it is using LDAP 2.0.
AutoIT Scripting
A few months back, I had found a solution called AutoIT. I downloaded and installed it, and attempting to write a quick little program. At the time however, I really didn’t want to have to learn another scripting language as I had already started getting heavily into VBScript. Just a week or so ago, I realized it was wrong of me to just throw it to the side. AutoIT and it’s scripting language is an amazing language, and is basically a BASIC language. It is incredibly easy to use, and very powerful. There are so many commands that are already built in, and on top of all that, you can compile it into a standard EXE file that doesn’t require any libraries. If you wanted to go crazy, you could even create a GUI. I’d like to say that I wish I had found this product years ago. I could have created a lot of powerful tools. If you are looking to script common actions, networked or not, try out AutoIT. Keep an eye here, as I will be posting some of my AU3 scripts here.
Touch for HTTP in VB Script
There are times when I need a Windows program that performs an outside function to simply access a website with a particularly formed URL. Many times, these programs do not have an option to “touch” a URL. By touch, I am referencing the touch command in Linux which creates an empty file. Sometimes I need to touch something like http://www.somewebsite.com/folder/update.php?q=Update. I could use wget for Windows, but why do that when I could use a built-in function of Windows. I wrote a VB Script that simply “gets” a URL and exits.
' httptouch.vbs
' Created by Jason C. Greb
' http://www.grebfamily.us/electronerdz.com/
Set Args = WScript.Arguments
URL = Args(0) ' Read argument (must be in quotes)
Set oHTTP = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP")
oHTTP.Open "GET", URL, False
oHTTP.Send() ' Send to the server
'Wscript.Echo oHTTP.Status ' Output the status if you'd like
Set oHTTP = Nothing
This script takes an argument after it, in quotes, and accesses that URL, then quits. You can add it to your program that runs an external program and put the argument after it. Keep in mind that you may need to reference the cscript.exe file (usually in system32) then the script, then the argument.
Stop calls about locked accounts
From time to time in a corporate network a user may lock out their account accidentally. In the corporate network that I am involved in there are generic accounts (unfortunately with dead simple passwords) that occasionally get locked. Since this is a 24/7 operation, it can happen in the middle of the night (in fact, more common at night). So to ease this a bit, and be proactive, I decided to find a way to get an alert every time an account gets locked. I of course, just used Windows easy to use built in feature. Oh wait, Windows doesn’t have that… Read on for how I did this…
Active Directory Lookup in PHP
I’ve found it necessary to do some searching of LDAP on a Windows server from a PHP script. It took a while to compile everything I needed, and I thought it’d be helpful if someone else had this code for their use. Read on to find out how to perform an LDAP search against AD.