Smart Ping when restarting

Hi,
You restart a remote server because you installed some new MS updates and you need to know when it's back online.
What we all do?, start pinging the server and continue to do other things.
when we come back after few minutes to the ping window we see that the server is online but we missed to see it's gone offline.
The following script (I called it "Smart Ping") will check the output from the ping action and look for specific word to let you know that the server went down and went up again.

Fill free to change the words it searches as you see fit in your environment.

=======================================
echo off
cls
:dead
title Server [%1] is going to shut down [%time%]...
ping -n 1 -w 300 %1 find "Request timed out."
IF %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (goto back_alive) ELSE (goto dead)
:back_alive
title Server [%1] is down [%time%]...
ping -n 1 -w 300 %1 find "TTL"
IF %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (goto end) ELSE (goto back_alive)
:end
title Server [%1] is Back online [%time%]...
pause
=======================================

Enjoy...

Get AD group members (including nesting)

I looked for some time now for a command that will give me all the members of a group even if it contains nesting groups.





I'm happy to inform you that the answer was allways under my nose.





The command was: DSGET.





The following syntax worked for me:


==================================


dsget group CN=Group_Name,OU=Groups,DC=domain,DC=local -members -expand


==================================





MS Link





You can mix it up with my tip on how to get the DN from an NT name and simplify the command...

See which machine is alive...

If you need to run on a list of machines with some command, you want to make sure that the workstations (or servers) are alive and pingble.
The following script allow you to do just that.
It contains 3 elements:

1. "computers.txt" - the full list of computers in your LAN (probably from AD), names only!!!
2. "Step1.cmd" - run's the next file in a loop on each line from "computers.txt"
3. "Step2.cmd" - The command itself.

content of step1.cmd:
======================
for /f %%A in (computers.txt) do (step2.cmd %%A)
======================

content of step2.cmd:
======================
ping -n 1 -w 300 %1 find "TTL">nul
IF %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 (echo %1 >> alive.txt) ELSE (echo %1 >> dead.txt)
======================

Put them all in the same directory, execute step1.cmd and the script will split the big list into 2 small lists, alive.txt and dead.txt - the content is self applies...

By for now...