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In my last article, I gave a general introduction to AutoAdministrator, an easy-to-use tool that lets you automate all kinds of Windows administrator tasks. Now let’s have a closer look at AutoAdministrator’s functions. Today I will cover all of AutoAdministrator's query functions.
Note: 4sysops readers get a discount on AutoAdministrator of $20 USD until the end of 2010, which means that you pay only $49 USD instead of the regular price of $69 USD. indicating that you are a 4sysops reader.
Monitor online status
Before you perform a particular action, it is advisable to check whether the relevant computers are available. With AutoAdministrator, you can ping any number of computers with just two mouse clicks. You can configure the packet count, the packet size, the required success rate, and the maximum roundtrip time. The latter two options determine whether a machine is flagged as available or whether you receive an error message. Note that every AutoAdministrator feature can do a ping before it actually performs the action, to make sure that there are no unnecessary timeouts.
Remote WMI query
The WMI function is a new feature of AutoAdministrator 2.3. As you probably know, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is a very powerful infrastructure that enables you to remotely access literally every piece of available information for a Windows machine. You can retrieve common information such as installed network cards or service packs but also very specific data such as the BIOS version or the block size of data volumes.
With AutoAdministrator, you can now easily run WMI queries on multiple machines. As you can see in the screenshot, you have to first select the WMI namespace and then select a WMI class. Then you can choose multiple WMI objects.
In my example, I have selected the WMI class Win32_BootConfiguration, which allows you to retrieve information of WMI objects such as BootDirectory, LastDrive, or TempDirectory.
Remote query of file metadata
The File Information function allows you to query file metadata on multiple remote machines. You can retrieve the file size, attributes, modification time, version, company, and description of any specific file. AutoAdministrator also enables you to calculate several checksums (CRC-32, MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256). This feature could prove to be very useful in a number of situations. For instance, if there is a virus outbreak for which your anti-virus software doesn’t yet have the appropriate signatures, you can identify the infected machines by using AutoAdministrator and then use its file management feature (which I will cover in another post) to overwrite the infected files.
Who is logged on
With this feature, you can retrieve information about users who are logged on to remote hosts. As usual, AutoAdministrator displays the retrieved information beside each computer name. It is also possible to just count the users who are logged on, which could be useful for Terminal Servers.
In my next post, I will cover the AutoAdministrator features that allow you to remotely execute programs.
