viperz2000

Cacti is a wonderful utility however it's not for the non-techy person. It basically monitors your router/server/firewall so that device needs to support snmp i believe. Here's the link to it: http://cacti.net/

i do it after the pc is booted with a few batch and vbs files. you will notice below that i'm using variables which are part of a HUGE set of files that prompt the tech for the user name, pw, and group info... store that info in an encrypted text file, then backup the data to a server. afterward, we reimage the orginal system or image a new one, run the restore batch files which asks the tech "who is this user", then changes the pc name to what it was before (and also prompts you to change it if needed), adds it to the domain, adds the proper users and groups to the admins, and then restores the data from the server. it's been a "work in progress" for the last several months. Anyway, here are a few parts of it: exe\netdom join %computername% /domain:MYDOMAIN /ou:"ou=sales workstations,ou=oh,ou=cinci,dc=oh,dc=mydomain,dc=net" /userd:%tech% /passwordd:%techpw% then it uses a "shutdown" command to reboot. next it runs: net localgroup administrators tl\USER-AD-NAME-GOES-HERE /add once again, it reboots and then adds some other global groups to the local admins. the text below is the contents from a vbs file: On Error Resume Next 'get main objects/variables Set ws = WScript.CreateObject ( "WScript.Shell" ) compname = ws.ExpandEnvironmentStrings ( "%COMPUTERNAME%" ) Set adGrp = GetObject ( "WinNT://" & compname & "/Administrators,group" ) 'add domain groups to local admin group adGrp.Add ( "WinNT://TL/_OH Help Desk,group" ) adGrp.Add ( "WinNT://TL/_OH Micro Support,group" ) 'handle errors If (Err.Number <> 0) Then strError = "AddAdmins.vbs was unable to add the specified groups to the local Administrators group." strError = strError & vbCrLf & vbCrLf strError = strError & "Error #: " & Err.Number & vbCrLf strError = strError & "Source: " & Err.Source & vbCrLf strError = strError & "Description: " & Err.Description & vbCrLf ws.LogEvent 1, strError Else ws.LogEvent 0, "The local Administrators group was successfully updated." End If i found a ton of info on this site as well as experts-exchange.