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NETIKUS.NET’s AutoAdministrator has been around for a while, and the previous version was reviewed here at 4sysops. But NETIKUS.NET, also the developers of EventSentry,made AutoAdministrator a completely free (as in beer) product as of its latest release.
AutoAdministrator - View users logged on to remote hosts
The name of the game for AutoAdministrator is doing things that need to be done, repetitively, in bulk, without scripting. The software allows you to do such tasks as executing processes remotely, changing local admin passwords, rebooting workstations, restarting services, copying files, and modifying the registry. In addition, AutoAdministrator allows you to query various data sources (WMI, file attributes, active logins, etc.) across multiple machines.
Features
Service/Password management: I’ve only recently started using the application myself, but I’m immediately seeing its use in password management for services. How many Windows services do you have that run as either the local or domain administrator and are installed on a variety—if not all—of your Windows servers? With AutoAdministrator, instead of changing all of them by hand or writing a script to do this task, you can do the following:
- Select Password from the first drop-down box to change the local administrator password on all the selected machines.
- Choose Services and then select the service for which you need to change the authentication. Then, select the Set Logon tab and enter your new credentials. You can optionally check the box to restart the service afterward.
AutoAdministrator - Password Management
If the service you want to update does not exist on the local machine (and thus is not listed in the drop-down), then simply enter the service key name.
Execute processes: AutoAdministrator also allows you to execute processes in the same manner. How many times have you needed to kick off a process on all workstations, either domain-wide or within a site? Updating an antivirus application immediately comes to mind. Simply provide a network-accessible path or local path and its arguments, select the computers you wish this apply to, and select Start. I’ve found this feature not only easy but also very quick to execute.
Beyond that, a great deal of other features exist to make your day a little easier. These include:
- WMI Query: Quickly query WMI objects on remote systems and display in a single view.
- Registry: Read and modify the registry, both in HKLM and HKCU, remotely.
- File Information: Query all sorts of information (attributes, versions, file size, etc.) about files.
- Shutdown/Reboot: Remote manage the shutdown and reboot of systems en masse.
- Logons: Ever need to know who’s logged on where? Here’s your answer. Query which users are logged on to which systems.
- ODBC: Also very handy, this feature allows you to modify the ODBC DSNs on remote hosts.
- Ping: Conduct mass pings.
- File Management: Mass copy or delete a set of files or folders on a group of computers. This feature looks very promising but, in testing, caused some application crashes.
Overall impressions
Overall, I’ve found AutoAdministrator to be very useful, albeit with some bugs. For example, I found that, when trying to delete a folder using the File Management feature, I could never select the “Add Folder” option. In the process of working with AutoAdministrator to write this article, the application crashed on me four times. All in all, though, I will use this as a quick way to do quite a few tasks going forward, and I recommend you do so, too.
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