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Showing posts from September, 2006

misc: displaying dell warranty data

might find this useful. took a very long time to get this... but now that i have it, i thought i'd share. using the following url, you can simply supply the service tag of a system to the end of the url. it'll take you right to the warranty page of a dell system. https://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/en/details? c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz & amp;~tab=2&ServiceTag= (it's all one long string; had to line break it) implications being, you could use this in your sms reports. you could also write a script to go to the site, pull down the data you need and write it back to something. hmmm...

mom: the absolute value of negativity...

i spent the better part of an afternoon writing a script to pick up some events in the event (ha?) that a machine had antivirus problems: dats too old, version too old, or antivirus not installed. i don't think that anyone would disagree with me on this one bit. scripting something like this is pretty straightforward... until you introduce it to mom. at that point, it's easy to get entrenched in stupidity. won't bore you with the details of all the iterations i spent writing in goofy lines of debug to figure out why it wasn't working. anyway, turns out the problem had a lot to do with this little bit of script. all the other stuff about version and existence worked fine. If DateDifference(CDate(sAVDate)) < sDaysBehind Then CreateEvent 41102,EVENT_WARN,"Antivirus Health Check","DATs are old." End If i've condensed the createevent line for brevity (and since brevity is the soul of wit, i should make this post small, right? actually... hmmm.).

mom: if it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs...

...but the push-button finger. and aren't we better creatures for it, mr. frank lloyd wright? by the way, pass me the remote. i'm already starting off on a very bad note. blogger just ate my homework so to speak. i was nearly done with this post when it decided to go rabid and eat the whole thing before my eyes. oh spare me the virtues of saving often. i'm quite annoyed. oh well. i hear that you actually write better when you write the same thing twice... uh huh. so to get started, recently the idea was tossed around that if we lost our management packs because of some errant corruption, we'd most likely have to reimport the stock management packs, trudge through the years of change data, and reset everything back to the way it was. either that or we have to restore the database. since neither of these options are really any better than eating a handful of chalk, we decided we should export management packs as a part of a weekly process. this way, if anyt

mom: editing rules en masse

so john hann sent an email about a blog post that he wrote which is coincidentally about a blog entry that stefan stranger posted (and might be posted by pete zerger or rory mccaw ) about a utility that michel kemp wrote to edit mom rules en masse. seriously, it's cool. go get it.