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KiXtart is by far the best admin scripting language. With VBScript you have to instantiate a COM object to do pretty much anything and has an annoying syntax. Whilst KiXtart fully supports COM, it also a has a ton of really useful inbuilt functions and it will it run on every version of Windows. Check out http://www.kixtart.org./ There is a very large community and hundreds of UDF's.

Considering applications, I would say both systems are pretty much equivalent these days, I can't think of any application in either Linux or Windows that doesn't have an equivalent in the other system.

Except perhaps the thousands of industry-specific programs that are written for Win32 because "that's what everyone has". Tool and mold shops have automation and cutter-path software that's virtually guaranteed to be Win32 as Irix and Sun have fallen out of popularity due to cost. Insurance companies have quoting and client-management packages that are written for Win32. Banks. Manufacturing. Accounting. Damned-near every industry seems to have at least one must-have application that's Win32 only. Business runs on Win32.

Try to automate any task in Windows, it's a real PITA. Programmers often end doing things through kludges like Excel macros for the lack of a good text-based interface. For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.

Sadly, the "for" operator has existed in the Win32 shell since WinNT 4.0 which was released July 29th, 1996 according to this cute Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT Further, it's time to mention that part of the massive staying power of Win32 is that availability of free/cheap utilities to fill pretty much every gap in the as-shipped OS is stunning. Not happy with the Win32 shell? Fine. Throw Kixtart into the mix. http://www.kixtart.org/ Don't like Kixtart? Okay, try 4NT which has a massive scripting language built in. http://www.jpsoft.com/ Want to automate GUI functions? Okay. AutoIT. http://www.autoitscript.com/
But again there are two points here: first, your experience with Win32 seems to be a decade misinformed and two, almost without fail where there's a lack in the Win32 product, there's a cheap or free way to satisfy it. Or, more likely, three or four ways.

Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application.

Once again a member of the pro-Linux crowd misses the point. Joe Average doesn't even remotely WANT to know how to "create a standard system configuration script". They don't want to know about apt-get or package files. The OS install is the OS install, and Win32's installer only asks a couple of questions, which almost always work if the user accepts defaults. Applications? Virtually always "insert the CD and accept defaults". Grandma can manage that, and she's had two strokes and is suffering from Alzheimer's as well as too much LSD in her earlier years. It doesn't matter at all that us geeks can write install scripts and create pre-built images. Home users and business users don't care. IT managers may, but IT managers have access to deployment packages and desktop management packages such as MOM http://www.microsoft.com/mom/default.mspx.
If Linux wants the desktop, Linux has absolutely got to do things automatically for the user. "Ooops, found a new printer you plugged in... want me to search the Internet for a driver? Okay, found one. Hey lady, you can just print now."

I think being an open and free system is an advantage in that people make it evolve towards what the users prefer, rather than

From the sounds of your other post Mac OS X does have lots of remote admin and software deployment tools to make an admin's job a lot easier and more efficient. I wasn't aware of them, but it does likely put it above and beyond where Windows XP currently stands (by the way SMS also stands for Systems Management Server, a legacy Microsoft app for remotely admining a Windows network).

As for the Windows software updates, I don't have workstations setup for Automatic Updates since then things are out of my hands. I disabled that service and deploy applications using logon scripts that combine KixTart and a poor man's InstallShield called Little Setup Builder. Just whip up a Ruby or Python script for parsing all of the installation log files and I instantly know how successful the software push was.

All of these are open source, built on LAMP, and run great on Windows.

HW & SW inventory: Winventory (http://winventory.sourceforge.net./
Trouble ticketing: Eventum (http://eventum.mysql.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page ). The Anonymous Reporting Form is a time saver.
Cacti (http://www.cacti.net./ Graphs all parameters on your servers and routers.
Documentation: TikiWiki (http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php). It has articles, FAQs and LDAP integration.
FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Ma in_Page). Mind maps are a FANTASTIC tool for documentation and you can publish them easily on a web server (get 0.8.1 beta3).

These are free, and get the job done.
SysInternals's tools (http://www.sysinternals.com./ Process Explorer and TCPView are the most useful, and there are many other great utils.
KiXtart (http://www.kixtart.org./ The best language for login scripts, and just about all your scripting needs on Windows.
Network Notepad (http://www.networknotepad.com./ Draw your nework diagrams here, and then publish them on your web server.

What's KiXtart

The KiXtart free-format scripting language has rich built-in functionality for easy scripting. It also supports COM (providing access to ADSI, ADO, WMI, etc) and thus is easily extensible. With the amazing KiXforms GUI for KiXtart, there is so little, if anything you can't accomplish with KiXtart.

And because of the User Defined Functions (about 500 ready UDF's on korg already), there is very little you need to code by yourself as much of the complex things have already been coded for you!

KiXtart is developed by Ruud van Velsen of Microsoft Netherlands

KiXtart is now provided to you as CareWare. Please see "KiXtart: Do You Care?" for full details.

It's pretty incredible, it's free, it allows you to do things you can't otherwise do at login with paying a lot of money (and did it sooner I believe), is written by an MS employee.

I don't use the light version of winstall le since it seems to much of a hassle wrt different configurations.

I use SUS for software updates, and apart from the fact that you need to use a lot of time checking what the updates do before approving it works fine. Most notably some updates still require a superuser to log on for it to install and work properly.

On app's the most important app is the notes client and MS Office, with notes we use smart upgrade, which actually allows users to upgrade the client when needed - MS Office needs updates and this is done manually. Since most of our pc's are the same (ie they are bought in batches) I use an usbdisk and sysresccd for imaging the machines, this is done each half year, and general app updating is done manually.

If we had the money we would probably be using a CA solution.

With the scripting, yes I mean http://kixtart.org/

• CKRename - Tool to mass rename files in a folder. Works very well for renaming MP3s.
• WinMerge (Use latest RC under beta builds) - Compare document, script, HTML, etc content versions (compares what has changed from revision to revision).
• XXCopy - Extended version of XCopy. This is a great utility for scripting file backups from one drive to another.
• ISOBuster - Open CD/DVD ISOs, BINs, IMGs, etc without having to burn them. Can extract files without burning as well.
• Vim - Improved version of the vi editor.
• IrfanView - Batch Image Processing and viewer (much like ACDSee, but FREE!).
• Diskeeper Lite - An updated version of the disk defragmenter that comes with Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This version does a better job of defragging the drive and shows you more information. The site isn't the manufacturer's, but the download does come directly from them. ExecSoft doesn't have this listed on their site anywhere anymore.
• Locate - Windows version of a linux utility. Creates a database of every file on your drives. You can then search and get instant results.
• xvi32 Hex Editor - Very nice hex editor.
• 7-Zip - A freeware file archiver. It supports all of the popular formats (ZIP, CAP, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM and DEB) as well as its own format, 7z.
• Max Lister - Create text lists of files in folders. For example, it's useful for an mp3 list.

Installation / Automation

• InnoSetup - Create your own EXE installers.
• ISTool - A GUI front-end for creating InnoSetup installer scripts.
• WinINSTALL LE 2003 - Create your own MSI installers. Also edit existing MSI installers (change options, add/remove components, etc).
• KiXtart - Advanced batch processing language. Commonly used for logon scripts but can be used to accomplish many tasks (comparable to using VBScript and WELL documented).
• AutoIt - Create scripts to send keys to applictions. Commonly used to "silently" install applictions that don't natively support silent install switches.

Multimedia Tools

We got hit by Nachi/Welchia at the end of August 2003 while I was on holiday with my daughter.

I came back to work to find the place in chaos (the volume of traffic that critter produced on our network was astounding).

I knocked up a KiXtart script which, when run remotely with Administrator credentials using Sysinternals.com's PSExec detected the presence of the worm, killed the process if it was running, ran McAfee's Stinger and patched the workstation.

A modifed version of that script which detects over 100 common viruses is now run on every workstation when the users log in.

In my experience, there's a residual 2 to 3 percent of workstations which, for a variety of reasons, refuse to be patched remotely (usually no ADMIN$ share, sometimes in need of a service pack).

Every month I use the same techniques to push out critical patches to our 2000+ desktop PCs.

It's amazing what you can do with free software.

In the Windows environment there are a host of different OS-specific needs which are best served by Windows-specific scripting programs.

Two which come to mind are KiXtart which I use to do clever things in our users' login scripts and Winbatch.

Phil

Until the JScript and WSH vulnerabilities come along ;-)

You can run WSH scripts from withing KiXtart scripts. I prefer KiXtart. It is so much easier to write, read, and understand. And just to keep us all happy, it's written by a Microsoft guy.

Money is indeed a very good reason, or rather, the lack of it. It impels those of us working in UK government departments (or local government, in my case) to adopt free and open source solutions simply so we can do our work effectively. MRTG, Nagios, KiXtart, and SysInternal's PSTools are all tools in my arsenal, and because they were free I just went and used them. No management financial decisions were needed, so a lack of budget couldn't get in the way of us doing our job properly.

The problem is that many in IT in the UK Civil Service (why do thay call it that, it's neither civil nor a service these days?) wear their Microsoft / Oracle / whatever they were brought up on blinkers, and feel / are way out of their depth when it comes to IT which involves more than point and click.

What the Office of Government Commerce is trying to remind Central and Local Government is that their solutions should be cost-effective.

For too long those in central and local government here have have taken tax incomes for granted. It's not like the real world where if you screw up your business goes under. The money flows in no matter how wasteful you are. It's worse than that, actually, for if you do a good job and shrink your expenditure, your budgets get cut, whilst habitual overspenders get their budgets increased. Crazy, huh?

AVG is total rubbish compared to Avast!, which is also free for personal use. Highly recommended.

I also recommend the image viewer IrfanView, the Filezilla ftp client and server, Audacity, The GIMP for Windows, the ConText text editor, the KiXtart scripting tool, GAIM for Windows, and that's just for starters.

Why not get KiXtart and play with it? It is free, has a lively user community, some great addons, and can be easily debugged. ScriptLogic have produced a good HTML Help version of the documentation, too. And there are loads of User Defined Functions to play with.

One idiot is even scripting Nagios plugins with it ;-)

Phil

Why not get KiXtart and play with it? It is free, has a lively user community, some great addons, and can be easily debugged. ScriptLogic have produced a good HTML Help version of the documentation, too. And there are loads of User Defined Functions to play with.

One idiot is even scripting Nagios plugins with it ;-)

Phil

Try using Kixtary as your logon script processor. You won't look back.

In a large enterprise, you should be making use of very basic central administration tools such as Logon Scripts (use Kixtart for complex requirements) to ensure that users always have access to the correct resources!

In the case of a printer being offline (for example, for maintenance), in a centrally managed infrastructure, it should be quite simple for you to redirect the print job to another printer at the server side, ensuring that users don't need to log out/in, or manually remap printers.

The IT Team need to know the nitty-gritty details of your enterprise network structure - but there should be no need for users to know anything other than "I save on drive X:, and I print to The Big Grey Laser"

Take the kixtart manual for example. For what reason do the readers need the source word file when PDF would suffice? Are the users going to be changing the manual? The word file is also bigger than the ghostscript-produced pdf file by about 50KB. PDF really is a much better format for transmitting most electonic documents, especially manuals. The few seconds it takes you to convert the file to PDF could save the people you send it to some time.