VBScripting at DOIR

What is VBScript?

VBScript (or visual basic scripting) is a scripting language made by Microsoft. A number of email worms have been written in VBScript. However, the language is quite powerful in assisting in system administration on Windows systems. Wikipedia and Microsoft have more info about it.

Specific Scripts

Some of the scripts I worked on included:

  • Phased Server Shutdown – This script would read a list of servers from an Access database and then shut then down, in order of priority. The shutdown would result in maximising battery uptime and keeping critical servers online as long as possible. The script took into account different factors about the servers, including shutting down virtual machines cleanly before shutting down the host server.
  • Homedrive/Media File Checker – This script was created due to the large amount of space that people’s personal home drives were taking up on the system. A number of users were known to store MP3s on these drives so a script was written to help resolve the situation. The script would check the size of all home drives and the size of certain files (MP3, AVI, etc). If a user exceeded a determined limit, an email would be generated and sent to them. The script was scheduled and logged details such as access denied errors, users who exceeded the limits, etc in both plain text and CSV (comma seperated value) logs.
  • Home Drive Creator – When a new user was created with the user management software at DOIR, a small file would be created with the users details. The user’s home drive and other drives would still have to be created manually by the system administration team based on the details in that file. I was asked to create a script that would poll for these small files on a regular basis. If such a file was found, it would check if the user’s drives existed. If they didn’t exist, the script would create them and send an email notification to the system administration and desktop support teams. The script also logged its activities to a CSV file.