For an application so ubiquitous on the corporate desktop, Adobe Acrobat is hard to deploy and manage at an enterprise level. To make reliable packages for Acrobat 6.02 Professional, Reader, and Standard I made use of the MSI Microsoft Installer technology, Enhanced Software Distribution and an extra trick or two.
One of the ongoing nuisances in Systems Management is Reboots. Users are unhappy if the computer reboots when they didn't want it to, including if they didn't log out overnight. The goal is to reboot the system if no one is logged in, but to nag a logged in user to reboot. LANDesk can be used to schedule a Windows Scripting Host VBS script that will do what it doesn't
EXPECT: A TCL based Toolkit for Automating Interactive
Tasks.
Leveraging the task specific capabilities of Expect with the power and
flexibility of PERL.
Presentation for Philadelphia PERLMongers, September 9, 2002.
In Windows 2000 and later critical functional information is bound into the system state of a Server, and is not easily recovered by simple file backups. If for testing or disaster recovery purposes you need to recover an Active Directory Domain and or Exchange Enterprise, you have no choice but to recover the system state of at least one Domain Controller per Domain, and if you wish to retain your sanity, all of your Exchange Servers.
Restoring System State for one of your Domain Controllers is just one step towards successful recovery of Active Directory. There are roles to seize and ghosts of vanished DCs to exorcise.
Software Deployment and other Scripts can be inserted into the Management Database directly using SQL statements and set to run in the future or from the command line on a console using CUSTJOB.EXE. This article refers to the 6.x Database structure. The database was redesigned in version 8.0.