Dwarfsoft [GPA]

I had started another post on Group Policy editing, and how the Policy files are structured, and how to use and improve on the existing Group Policy Editor tool. The post has been found to be far too epic, so I have decided to cover a smaller subset of recent finds.

As everybody is probably already aware, we use Novell ConsoleOne and Zenworks where I work. ConsoleOne has some interesting features that require that whenever a Group Policy is being edited it takes over as the policy on the machine that is editing it. Rather than have a useful tool like Microsofts Group Policy Management Console, Novell likes to replace the local Group Policy and then just run gpedit.msc. Which is where my first gripe about gpedit.msc comes in:

GPEdit.msc requires line by line entry of things like, for example, port exceptions and program exceptions for the Windows Firewall. This is usually not an issue except that, as I have discussed in previous posts, we have been moving towards a Windows Domain environment. Firewall Exception rules are configured within two places in Group Policy: Domain Profile and Standard Profile. I have found that there is a need to move our current Standard Profile settings across to the Domain Profile settings. After a bit of registry searching I found a neat trick for doing exactly that.

(continue reading…)

I have recently been having a look into determining the Last Login Time of a user for a BGInfo implementation. Firstly I had a look at the getCurrentUserLastLoginTime script suggested for use with BGInfo. The limitation of this script, however, is that it will reset the login time to the last time the Windows login box was Authenticated against, which also includes the time that the workstation was unlocked.

In order to maintain current BGInfo information the implementation is running periodically, so this is unnacceptable. Therefore I had to work to resolve the issue manually. As I have had a fair bit of experience with Windows Profiles recently (see the last blog post) I was familiar with the ProfileLoadTimeHigh and ProfileLoadTimeLow registry keys in the ProfileList. So I set out to determine how to actually use these to determine the login time. I first wrote some code to get the User SID based on the users “%userdomain%” and “%username%”:

(continue reading…)

As promised, here are the scripts required for the Pre-staging of Domain User Profiles on the local machine. The first thing we need to do is Enumerate all the Local User Accounts.

Function StageAllUsers(DomainFQDN, strDomain)
   ' Enumerate all users that are Local and not built in accounts.
   strComputer = "."
   Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
   'Enumerate users where the User Domain is the Local Machine
   Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
                  ("Select * from Win32_UserAccount " & _
                   "Where Domain = '" & GetComputerName & "' " & _
                   "And Disabled = FALSE And Name <> 'Administrator'")
   ' Stage each user
   For Each objItem In colItems
      ' Ensure the account actually has a profile (otherwise we can ignore it)
      If GetLocalUserProfile(objItem.Name) <> "" Then
         ret = StageUser(objItem.Name, DomainFQDN, strDomain)
      End If
   Next
End Function

The functions called here are GetComputerName, which returns the name of the local machine, and the other important ones are GetLocalUserProfile and Stage User. The first we can check is GetLocalUserProfile. (continue reading…)

I have updated my GTD-PHP Email Import Addon so that it now integrates with the current Subversion revision of the code. There is one bug left in it, in that it will not check that there is a mail server set before it tries to connect. I find that this error occurs the first time the session is established with the server, and from then on it works fine. By performing an error check against $server = “” I should be able to remove that bug as well.

The updated EmailImport Addon is now available for download from the GTD-PHP Trac wiki.

(continue reading…)

So I have been using the new script this morning, and testing adding new actions from the GroupWise account at work. Here is where I encountered some issues.

GroupWise decides it wants to MIME Encode the email, which brings about my first problem. I need to account for multiple MIME Parts. After resolving this my next issue is that the corporate email gateway decides to append a massive disclaimer at the bottom of the email, bloating my item by at least 1000%. So I implemented the ability to cut out disclaimers based on a stripos call. I can have a list of different filters here and it will cut them all out.

After fixing this up and resolving the functional issues I logged this addon as a ticket in the GTD-PHP Trac system.

(continue reading…)

I have been attempting to get a fully working system set up for David Allens Getting Things Done. To this end I have set up an install of GTD-PHP.

Being the kind of person who likes to adapt, change, and implement better solutions, particularly for myself, I created a list of features I would like to see in my GTD-PHP installation. One of the first problems I had with the existing system was that it does not support importing Inbox items from a real mail Inbox.

I did some research and came across an existing mail importer, however this required directly piping mail from SMTP into the php script, which I could not do on my host (or would prefer not to do).

(continue reading…)

I was required recently to audit passwords on all the Novell GroupWise accounts in the cluster. This was not too much of a problem using existing solutions, except that all the existing solutions limited searches to either Users, or to objects with the “NGW: Object ID” attribute.

The Solutions I found include Check GroupWise Users for Password – Batch and Check GroupWise Users for Password – Exe, both of which made use of GWSend. Being an avid scripting aficionado myself I opted for the first, so I could make changes.

First step was to export all User Objects with NGW: Object ID into an Excel sheet using DSReport. Then export all GroupWise External Entities with NGW: Object ID to a different Excel Sheet. Finally I needed to export all GroupWise Resources, which do not have an NGW: Object ID, but their CN is effectively the NGW: Object ID for which we can log in and try to send emails. Upon completing this I compiled a single list of Allusers.csv which had the NGW: ObjectID/CN in the first column, and the DN for the Object Name and Location within the tree. This makes it far easier to track down the location of generic accounts (Something that none of the scripts account for).

(continue reading…)

Since my last post I came to the realisation that I really didn’t like the way that the Diskpart box popped up on screen during the function call, so I did what I said I should have done and created the function the other way. This also cleans up the text files after completion, which is something the previous function didn’t do.

For completeness I also made the function a little more generic, so it takes the Volume Label as the Variable, and falls back to “IMAGE” if none was passed.

(continue reading…)