Christian’s blog

Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it’s less ugly than the batch script, trust me).

As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users (as in you can’t put a startup script onto an OU, which is going to map the printers). So as we store users and the computes in different OU’s in our Active Directory (we do have about 15.000 students), I can’t apply the printer.vbs to the users OU directly either, unless I implement some intelligence into the script itself.

And that’s basically what I did. Since different pools at the university have different DNS suffixes (like pools.rz.barfoo.org, that our or pools.fmz.barfoo.org) and we only want them students to have our printers when they logon at our pool, I just made the script to get the DNS DomainName of the current active interface and compare it against a given pattern.

' The problem is, if you apply something like this the users get the printers regardless whether they
' are at our location or a different one. So we either need to look up the current AD object (this computer),
' or just compare our current DNS suffix/DomainName against a known pattern.
 
' Now, lets get the DomainName from the WMI-Interface
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colNicConfigs = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration WHERE IPEnabled = True")
 
For Each objNicConfig In colNicConfigs
strDNSDomain = objNicConfig.DNSDomain
Next
 
' Apply some regexp foo, to see if we're at the computing center or not!
Dim regexp
Set regexp = New RegExp
regexp.Pattern = "pools.rz.barfoo.org"
 
if regexp.Test(strDNSDomain) Then
'If so, then lets just connect the printers we need!
Set WshNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
 
WshNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\nas.barfoo.org\Kyocera Mita FS-9100DN KX"
 
' Set the default printer to something useful
WshNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "\\nas.barfoo.org\Kyocera Mita FS-9100DN KX"
End If

Life Coding, Thin Clients, WMI, Work, WScript

As some of you know, the company I’m currently working for, recently acquired some thin clients to replace our old computers for the students to work on. Those PC’s are like P3 800 MHz with 512MB RAM and sadly don’t run Office 2007 anymore, so we replaced them with thin clients and are streaming those applications from a Windows Terminal Server cluster (created by and with 2X Application LoadBalancer).

So far so good, getting them to display the applications ain’t hard, the real hard part starts when you want additional things from this Windows XPe (Embedded), like lets say getting them to display a German language.

First thing is, the management software for those terminals (Wyse Device Manager or WDM) uses it’s own scripting language (with pseudo abbreviations like DF or MR - Delete File and Merge Registry - get it ?), which control the whole distribution of “packages“.

That ain’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just an additional “language” you need to understand/learn. The initial threshold is rather low (it ain’t no C++ or C#) as it’s just a pseudo language, you just need to make sure you do things in a certain order (like use the auto login registry entry with a new administrator password *after* you changed the administrator password).

We had a lot of work at the beginning of the week (like getting all packages working), and I think we managed finishing all of them (besides some default icon foo, for which is plenty of time when them terminals are already in use).

Life 2X, Thin Clients, Windows Terminal Services, Windows XP Embedded, Work, Wyse, Wyse Device Manager