Deploying Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows XP via Group Policy

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Group Policy is great, but sometimes you need to make tweaks to your systems in ways that aren’t covered by existing Group Policy settings. Traditionally login scripts were used to perform this task, but more recently I have used PolicyMaker by DesktopStandard. When Microsoft bought DesktopStandard and repackaged PolicyMaker as “Group Policy Client Side Extensions” (GPCSE) I was keen to deploy and use it. Continue reading →

Querying WSUS with Powershell

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Out of the box, WSUS is capable of reporting update status in a number of permutations, but I always seem to need some combination that I can’t easily derive using the GUI.

I recently needed to determine the status of a particular update (KB958644) for a number of computers that spanned different WSUS groups. I knew that there was a .NET API for WSUS management and so Powershell seemed to the most appropriate tool to use. I found this script example which got me started. Continue reading →

Open Audit

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Open Audit is an Open Source application distributed under the Creative Commons license to provide a hardware and software inventory of systems on your network. It uses Windows VBScript and Linux BASH scripts on the client to post audit info to a PHP/MySql server application. Continue reading →