After a rather hectic week of scripting a solution and then distributing it under an excessively short deadline, I have been asked to provide stats on the result of forcing this solution out to clients. The solution that I had to develop keeps tabs on a System Volume Image of PCs, and ensures that this Image never gets out of date too far. Currently I am not forcing a Store every restart, as the planned solution was to do, but I do inform the client that their current Image is out of date and ask them if they want to do a Store now. If they click on Yes then their PC is rebooted and the Store is done (providing that one of many flaws in the current Store process do not interrupt the process).

Because of some of the issues that we have had, as well as Managements want to view the impact of what we have done in a statistical format, I was required to provide a secondary application, which is just an updated version of an AutoIT Script that logs the Image Date into a log file during login. Because this file was preexisting it has been used in this way to gather stats for some time.

The issue is that the log file includes EVERY instance of a login for a PC, and I want only the most recent with the timestamp of the image, not all the other instances, or the log values that are too old (I was unable to clear the logs due to current procedure). Therefore I was required to learn some new things in the VBScript world. This solution is surprisingly fast considering how much data it is required to crunch in order to produce the output CSV file.

Const ForReading = 1
Const ForWriting = 2

Dim arrLines()
i = 0

Set objDictionary = CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

objStartFolder = WScript.ScriptFullNameobjStartFolder = Replace  (objStartFolder, WScript.ScriptName, "") 

Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(objStartFolder & "Logs")

Set colFiles = objFolder.Files
For Each objFile in colFiles
    Set textFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(objFile.Path, ForReading)

    Do Until textFile.AtEndOfStream
        Redim Preserve arrLines(i)
        arrLines(i) = textFile.ReadLine
        i = i + 1
    Loop

    For i = Ubound(arrLines) to LBound(arrLines) Step -1
        splt = Split (arrLines(i),",")

        If (UBound(splt) < 19) Then
            i = LBound(arrLines)
        Else
            If Splt(19) <> "" Then
               If Not objDictionary.Exists(splt(1)) Then
                  objDictionary.Add splt(1),splt(19)
               End If
            End If
        End If
    Next

    ReDim arrLines(0)
    i = 0
    textFile.Close
Next

Set writeFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(objStartFolder & "Stores.csv")
For Each strKey in objDictionary.Keys
   writeFile.WriteLine strKey & "," & objDictionary.Item(strKey)
Next
writeFile.Close

In this particular script the splt Array has 20 columns (or 19 for those items that were prior to me updating the script). Column 2 (or splt(1)) is the PC Name, and Column 20 (or splt(19)) is the Timestamp of the Image. This script reads through every file in the Logs folder (in the same path as the script) and reads the file in reverse until it comes across the entries with only 19 columns. For every unique PC Name that it finds it adds this into a Dictionary object with the Timestamp as the value. The Dictionary is then written to the new CSV file one at a time.

In order to get the stats on how effective this has been, I paste a couple of Excel Macros:

=COUNTIF(B:B,">22/08/2008")
=COUNT(B:B)

The magic date here is the 22nd of August 2008. This was chosen purely because it was a recent date, and it was newer than most of the Images for the PCs within the IT Department, who already had the AutoStore scripts working on their machines. Which provided for a controlled Environment for testing some of the modifications I was forced to make last minute.

One thing that I could do to improve the accuracy of this script is to pull out all the Workstation Names from Novell using LDAP and get a total overall status of where the Store dates are across all PCs, but that would pollute the pool with a large number of machines that have been decommissioned (they still appear as a Workstation in Novell until they have not been logged on to for 3 months, then they fall off the system).

On a side note, I have to pull in the Logs into the Logs directory in some way, which is achieved for me by running a Batch file which I have written as follows:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Pulling Logs %DATE% - %TIME%>>Log.txt
ECHO.>>Log.txt
%~d0
cd %~dp0
FOR /F "tokens=*" %%A IN (Sources.txt) DO (
  FOR /F "tokens=1 delims=" %%Z IN ("%%A") DO (
     COPY "%%AlogsLogIn.csv" "%~dp0Logs%%Z.csv" /A /D /Y /Z >>Log.txt
  )
)
ECHO.>>Log.txt
ECHO Current Stores being Rebuilt at %DATE - %TIME%>>Log.txt
WScript Stores.vbs
Start Excel Stores.csv
ECHO Log Pull Finished at %DATE% - %TIME%>>Log.txt

This script uses a file called “Sources.txt” which is a list of paths on newlines which point to where each of the Logs are stored. Each line consists of something like \ServerNameSYSPUBLIC. The line FOR /F “tokens=1 delims=” %%Z IN (“%%A”) allows me to pull out the servername from each line in the file, so that when I copy the file from the server, I can rename it so that its source can be identified.

I think this will conclude todays lesson in VBScript and Batch, and I’d best get back to studying.

Cheers, Chris.

Function GetServerFromDrive(DriveLetter)
 
   Set fso = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
   Set Drives = FileSystemObject.Drives 
 
   For Each DiskDrive in Drives
      If DiskDrive.DriveLetter = Drive Then
         ShareParts = Split(DiskDrive.ShareName,"\")
 
         Server = ShareParts(2)
         Volume = ShareParts(3)
      End If
   Next
 
   If IsEmpty(Server) Or IsEmpty(Volume) Then
      'This is not a network Drive. Exiting.
      GetServerFromDrive = ""
   Else
      GetServerFromDrive = Server
   End If
End Function

This function can be called to retrieve the servername that is associated with the mapped network drive. If the sharename does not include both a Server Name and a Volume Name part then an empty string is returned.

Server = GetServerFromDrive("H")

Now, the server returned by this may not actually be the name of the server that is hosting the volume, but merely a synonym for the server that is hosting the volume. If we want to know exactly which cluster server has the role of the host for this volume then we need to get into some LDAP querying.

Function GetVolumeClusterServerPath(ServerName)
   On Error Resume Next
   dim sam, objLDAP, ClusterServer
   GetVolumeClusterServerPath = ""
 
   Set objLDAP = GetObject("LDAP:")
   Set sam = objLDAP.OpenDSObject("LDAP://" & ServerName & "/RootDSE","", "", 0)
 
   ClusterServer = sam.Get("dsaName")
   GetVolumeClusterServerPath = ClusterServer
End Function

I’ve used “On Error Resume Next” in this function because in the eDirectory tree that I have been testing against, some machines fail to connect to /RootDSE, and will error out of the script at this point. By requesting dsaName from the RootDSE object, we retrieve the actual name for the cluster server that is hosting the volume. This returns the Full LDAP Path of the Server Object. As we really only need the name itself and not the path we can either split by “,” then split the first element by “=” and get the second element, or we can open the LDAP object and get the cn:

Function GetServerCN(ClusterServerPath)
   dim objLDAP, sam, ServerCN
   GetServerCN = ""
 
   Set objLDAP = GetObject("LDAP:")
   Set sam = objLDAP.OpenDSObject("LDAP://QLDHEALTH/" & ClusterServerPath,"", "", 0)
 
   ServerCN = sam.Get("cn")
   GetServerCN = ServerCN
End Function

I’ll probably post up my scripts for listing Security for groups/folders later, just due to there being so few resources around that have Novell eDirectory scripting ideas. I have been using Microsofts LDP to browse the eDirectory tree and determine what information I can extract from eDirectory over LDAP. There will be a few more scripts coming soon.

Cheers, Chris.