Admin Arsenal Blog

Which computers are missing Microsoft Office?

We hear variations of this question quite often. Sys Admins write in and say something like "Hey, it's great that I can see what applications are installed but how can I find the computers that are missing certain applications?"

This is a valid question and, good news, you can, most likely, have it answered quickly and for free. PDQ Inventory Collections are a great way to organize your office computers by which software is or ISN'T installed. 

Let's take Microsoft Office. Out of the box PDQ Inventory has a collection called Systems with Microsoft Office. Under this collection exist 3 child (or Sub) collections. The parent collection (Systems with Microsoft Office) has a simple filter. Show all computers that have an application containing Microsoft Office in the name. (OK, it's a tad smarter than that, but I'll get into the specifics of the filter later). Each child collection has a filter which identifies even more specifically as to whether the computers have 2003, 2007 or 2010 versions of Microsoft Office. That is all fine and good but let's take this a little farther and identify computers missing Office.

There are two excellent ways to do this. One is slightly more intuitive so we'll discuss this method today.

Since we already have a Collection which already identifies which systems have Microsoft Office you can build a collection which effectively says "show me computers that aren't in the collection called "Systems with Microsoft Office". Let's use the following steps:

• Create a Dynamic Collection called "Systems missing Microsoft Office"
• Add a filter type of Collection and specify that any computer cannot be a member of the collection "Systems with Microsoft Office"
• Save it and look at the results. Wait... We don't care about Servers since they will never have Office installed. So let's define another filter to strip out servers. 
• Edit the Collection and add a new Operating System filter (click the blue + icon to add a new filter) where the OS Name does not contain the word "server". Let's also add a Never Scanned is False filter to strip out any computer from showing up which has never had an inventory scan.

Here is a video showing how to create this collection.

See more examples on our public forums

http://support.adminarsenal.com/entries/20914353-collections-group-computers-which-are-missing-certain-apps-example-two

 

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Final Beta for PDQ Deploy 1.5 released

Rock on. We just released (OK, a few days ago... gimme a break I've been helping a friend move) Beta 4 of PDQ Deploy. You can get it here. Here is a quick summary of the features introduced since beta 3:

• New Offline Policy option to send Wake-on-LAN (WOL) to offline computers before deployment.
• This feature is enabled in Pro mode of PDQ Inventory
• PDQ Inventory (free or pro) required
• Add descriptions to all Credentials that are used in PDQ Deploy.
• Recurring scheduled deployments only send out email notifications if the status of computers has changed since the last scheduled run. 
• PDQ Deploy will automatically create additional target (staging) directories if previous deployment left locked files on the target.
• Ability to run individual deployments and schedules as Local System. (This was, previously, a global setting)
• Added Started and Run Time values to each computer in a deployment.
• Option to send or not send email notifications per deployment or schedule. (This was, previously, a global setting)

Thanks to our online community of users who have been using the beta versions of PDQ Deploy. From bug reports to feature requests to offers to "buy the next round" we are very grateful.

Speaking to the screaming hordes of fans that live in his head, Adam Ruth calmly laid out plans for the official release of PDQ Deploy 1.5 by saying "...yeah, it'll be released pretty soon, I guess."

Touching and inspiring words from a man who once performed a Dramatic Interpretation (for which he received the fish-belly white Participant ribbon) on the history Cheese during a drama competition in 1989.

Windows Remote Commands - Run 'em right from the Free PDQ Inventory

What do you do when you need to run a command on a remote computer?

Using the free PDQ Inventory you can run commands on remote computers all you want. If you've ever used the awesome PSTools then you'll know how important it is to run a good Windows remote command on your networked computers.

Before we begin, it's important to understand what is happening when we use the "Remote Command" feature in PDQ Inventory. When you initiate a Remote Command against a target computer you are actually running that command "locally" on the actual target. The "remote" part comes from the fact that you are defining the command from your PDQ Inventory console. When you actually submit the Remote Command a Windows Service is created on the target computer and that service passes the command you defined to the local CMD.exe process. This means that any command you supply has to exist (or is accessible) on the target system. Let's get started.

To kill a Freecell game on a remote computer you could type:

 taskkill /f /im freecell.exe

Plus, with Remote Command in PDQ Inventory you don't have to limit yourself to running a command on just one computer. If you really want to piss off the freecell players at your company you can select multiple computers or even a PDQ Inventory Collection as your target. The screenshot below shows me killing freecell.exe on all the computers in the "Accounting computers" collection.

 

The 11 computers in the Collection called "Accounting computers" would then be targets for the Remote Command.

How about wanting to quickly stop and start a service. You can "restart" a service by running two commands on the same command line. In the example below we will stop and start the DNS Client service. This can be handy when a target computer needs its DNS cache updated. 

In the command above I simply passed to "net.exe" commands. One to stop the DNS Client service (the service name is dnscache) and one to start it. (Windows doesn't have a native CLI, outside of PowerShell, to "restart" a service). This is a great example, however, of running two commands in sequence. We separate the different commands with a single Ampersand '&'. BTW, you can use two Ampersands '&&' and that will run the next command only if the preceding command finished successfully. 

Let's get a little trickier. Since the awesome suite of tools ( I mentioned them earlier) known as PsTools are freely available I highly recommend that you download and use them in your everyday Sys Admin tasks. In this case, let's use the command 'PsService' to actually RESTART a service. This way we wouldn't have to use the two separate net.exe commands (shown above) to stop and then start a service.

In this example I have the PsTools suite available on a file server known as Scranton (for you The Office fans out there...you'll get the reference). The Share name on Scranton is called "Deploy". I just need to type in the full UNC to the PsService.exe command to run it.

\\Scranton\Deploy\Microsoft\PsTools\PsService.exe restart dnscache -accepteula

The arguments that I pass PsService.exe are 1) the service instruction (restart) and 2) the name of the service (dnscache). I also pass the

-accepteula

argument to prevent the End User License Agreement (EULA) window from hanging the entire process. 

Note the Credentials field. The user account I am using is Quintana running in the Deadwood domain. In this case, Quintana MUST have the appropriate permissions to access and execute the PsService.exe utility on the remote server (Scranton). Quintana also must (obviously) have Administrator rights on the target computers.

One more note: Any command that you execute from Remote Command cannot have any prompts or windows that must be answered to execute correctly. An example is this:

Let's say you want to copy an updated file called CompanyRules.avi from a network share to the target computer. You intend to use the native 'copy' command in Windows. If the target computer already has an older copy of CompanyRules.avi you will get a prompt asking if you want to overwrite the existing file. This prompt will cause the Remote Command to hang indefinitely since this prompt cannot be answered remotely. To get around this you would need to use the /Y argument.

In the example below you will see that I locally ran two copy commands. The first without the /Y argument. Since CompanyRules.avi already existed I was prompted to confirm that I wanted to proceed. Since I was running this locally I was able to answer 'Y' and proceed. This would have, however, Timed Out using a Remote Command unless I passed the /Y argument. You can see two examples of passing /Y. Once locally and once via Remote Command.

Here is how you would do this via a Remote Command in PDQ Inventory

 

So there you go. Definitely use the Remote Command feature. It will become essential in your everyday duties. Think of the commands that you commonly need to run and consider using them here. Now, go kill some more Freecell games.

 

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Disable Automatic Updates for Java using PDQ Inventory

One of the first things that most Sys Admins like to do after they deploy Java is to disable the automatic upgrade check. The last thing a sys admin wants is to receive hundreds of calls all asking the same question "I have  a window saying that there is a...one minute... Java J-R-E update. Do I have a virus?"

Using PDQ Inventory you can send a remote command to turn off the automatic upgrade check. If you have the Pro mode of PDQ Inventory enabled you can also verify all the systems that do or don't have this setting applied.

The following video shows the steps needed to nail this down. In the first step we create a dynamic collection to display which systems have Java version 6.

Follow along in your own environments and you will get a good idea of how PDQ Inventory can help you get control of your computers.

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PDQ Deploy 1.5 Beta 3

We're pleased to announce the availability of Beta 3 for PDQ Deploy 1.5.  You an get it here and try out the new features and changes.

• Schedules can be configured to stop deploying to successful computers, or to computers that have failed a number of times past a certain threashold. This has been one of our most requested features and we're glad to have it available.
• Computers will be deployed to in the order that deployments were created. Prior to this beta, it was possible for a deployment to "jump the queue" and deploy to a target before an earlier deployment got the chance to.
• Schedules can now be set to always use the "default" user, so that they will change if the default user changes.  This setting is now the default.
• Allow multiple deployments to the same computer.  This will allow more than one user to deploy to the same computer at the same time.  This will be expanded in beta 4 to remove the dreaded "Failed to clean-up target directory" error when a prior deployment is still locking files on the target.

Feel ready to give it a go?  Download the beta from here and sign up for e-mail updates when new versions are available. 

 

PDQ Inventory 1.0.2 (Beta 2)

We're pleased to announce the first beta release of PDQ Inventory 1.0.2.  It's available now for download.

There are a couple of larger features that should be highlighted:

• Active Directory collections are now available. 
  For those of you moving from AA Console, this will probably be a welcome addition.  Computers that are in Active Directory are automatically placed within these collections, which are themselves automatically generated.
• New data grids. 
  We've moved over to the same data grids which we introduced in the last PDQ Deploy beta.  These grids have a number of nice features for filtering and grouping, as well as doing a better job of printing.
• Copy and paste of scanners and scan profiles.
• Additional options for deleting computers during an AD Sync.
  Deleting computers during a sync has always been a bit problemmatic, and now we have 2 deleting options.  One option is for when you have a mix of sync'd and manually added computers, and the other for when you have only computers from Active Directory.
• Computer tools can now be used from reports.
  Not all reports can use computer tools, because each row doesn't resolve down to a single computer, but most reports will work fine.

In addition to these features there are a number of bug fixes.  You can get all of the juicy details in the Update Notes.

As always, we hope you enjoy the changes and we look forward to getting your feedback.

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Send a message to your computers using PDQ Deploy

In my previous blog I discussed how you can use PDQ Inventory to send messages (via msg.exe) to your computers using the Remote Command feature. Today I will show you how you can do the same thing in PDQ Deploy. If you are using the free version of PDQ Deploy then you should probably use a script (a simple batch file will do).

I created a batch file with the following command:

msg * /TIME:%1 %2

The variables (%1 and %2) aren't necessary if you want to just hard code the timeout value (%1) and the message (%2) you want to display. I am using the variables to illustrate that you can use the same script to send many different messages. Othewise you'd have to change the script for each message you want to send. The only caveat to using the variables is that you need to encapsulate the Message part of your MSG command in quotes. The image below is the Installer window showing that I am calling the SendMessage.bat (contents above) and passing in the Timeout (%1) and Message body (%2).

Below you can view a video example of sending this message using the free PDQ Deploy.

 

In an upcoming article I will demonstrate how to use PDQ Deploy Pro to send a message before or after a deployment. This can be useful when you want to send a "heads up" message to your users that an installation is going to begin or to let them know when an installation is complete.

Need to send a message to your computers? It's easy and free!

We all remember the days of net send, right? It was a handy little tool back in the day. Since net send went away there seems to be a perception that it isn't as easy to send a message to Windows' computers anymore. B.S. If you want to send a message to some or all of your computers you can use the free PDQ Inventory or PDQ Deploy. Today we'll look at how to do this in PDQ Inventory. 

Let's say I want to send a message to all of my Windows computers which reminds the users to reboot their computers at the end of their shift. Go ahead and open up your PDQ Inventory console. In the example below I right-click my Online Systems collection (I mean, why try to send a message to a computer that's offline?) and select Tools / Remote Command

In this case I simply type in the following to my command field:

msg * /TIME:120 Please restart your computer before you leave for the day

The splat (*) tells msg.exe to send the message to every session on the target computer. Obviously the /TIME:120 argument tells msg.exe to display the message for 120 seconds or until someone acknowledges the window. Check out the video example below.

We will show you how to do this in PDQ Deploy in our next blog.

How to perform a silent install of Thunderbird

Installing Mozilla Thunderbird across your network is remarkably easy. The options for deployment are pretty much identical to its sibling, Firefox. Check out Shawn's blog from earlier this year about performing a silent install of Firefox.

The easiest way to deploy Thunderbird is to pass the command line argument of

-ms 

By doing this you will be installing Thunderbird with all the default options.

If you don't want to change the default options (such as where you want the shortcuts residing) then you can create an answer file for the installation. The answer file is a standard .INI file and your command line argument would be

/INI=<full path to INI>

When using the /INI argument using the full path is critical, as relative paths do not work. 

Here is an example answer file that I called Thunderbird.ini. In this example I specify that no Thunderbird shortcut should be placed on the Desktop.

[Install]
InstallDirectoryName=Mozilla Thunderbird
CloseAppNoPrompt=true
QuickLaunchShortcut=true
DesktopShortcut=false
StartMenuShortcuts=true

The example below is a screenshot from PDQ Deploy 1.5 beta 2.

The image below is only important if you are performing the installation via PDQ Deploy 1.2.9 or earlier AND you are using your INI file on a remote file server.

*** If you are using PDQ Deploy 1.2.9 or earlier AND you are going to have your INI file on a network share you will need to pass your credentials again when you actually deploy the software. This is due to the "Double Hop" security feature in Microsoft Windows. Unless you have Delegation enabled (not likely) you will need to pass your credentials again***

Of course if you are using  PDQ Inventory (it's also free) you can easily determine which systems have Thunderbird already. ;-)

 

 

Inventory Installed Software with the free PDQ Inventory

Our bosses questions seem to be played on a bad repeat cycle. It reminds me of those 80's DJ's who would fall asleep on the graveyard shift thus keeping WHAM and Men Without Hats playing in a loop. Well, not so much a "loop" but a spiral down the toilet that inevitably ended up as an inner circle in some feces-splattered music hell.

That is how we can all feel with the same questions from our bosses. Here is a question that I have heard in varying forms over the years:

1. How many computers have Microsoft Office? And don't just tell me, send me a report!

Well, this question is easy enough to answer by simply opening up PDQ Inventory and highlighting the Systems With Microsoft Office collection.

OK, we can send our boss a screenshot but that will only piss him off. Let's create a report. Watch this video to see how we create a very simple report in PDQ Inventory.

There you have it. Reporting your Inventory is simple, powerful and in many ways, it's free. And it doesn't stop here... you should be thinking, "hey, I need to deploy Microsoft Office to all of my computers. Well, with PDQ Deploy, we gotcha covered. Check out Shawn's blog about deploying Office 2010.

So pull up those trousers or gird up your loins or whatever you do to dramatically announce that you're about to do something important and get down to creating some reports in PDQ Inventory. You'll thank me.