October 25, 2013

Spectacle OSX Mavericks fail


Did you upgrade to OSX Mavericks only to find Spectacle failing and no "Enable access for assistive devices" option available?

Me too.

Go to your Systems Preferences, go to Security and Privacy, go to Privacy, then Accessibility, and finally check-mark Spectacle (You may need to click the Lock at the bottom left corner first).



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October 17, 2013

Batch file: For each live computer in a domain, do something



Need a batch file to perform an action, executable, or script for online domain members only?

Here, for simplicity, our do-something is "echo computer-name is online":

Save the following to a batch file: (two % signs are needed in batch files, one % if at the command-prompt)


@echo off

dsquery * domainroot -filter "(&(objectCategory=Computer))" -limit 0 -attr cn > computers.txt

for /f %%i in (computers.txt) do (
   ping -n 1 -w 500 %%i | find "Lost = 0">NUL && echo %%i is online || echo %%i is offline
)

del computers.txt


This can easily be changed to work on a specific OU and skip sub-OU's (-scope onelevel):

dsquery * "OU=EXAMPLE_OU,DC=EXAMPLE,DC=COM" -filter "(&(objectCategory=Computer))" -limit 0 -attr cn -scope onelevel > computers.txt

So your do-something could be powerful when combined with commands like:
psexec.exe \\%%i some-command
or
START /B some-batch-calling-psexec.bat

You could get fancy and do multiple things by enclosing them in ( ) but separating them with &:
( echo %%i online & script.bat %%i)


So here is an example batch file that runs "gpudate /target:computer /force" on the Computers OU and it's sub OU's (This assumes you are logged in with administrative privileges):

@echo off
setlocal enableextensions enabledelayedexpansion

dsquery * "OU=Computers,DC=EXAMPLE,DC=COM" -filter "(&(objectCategory=Computer))" -limit 0 -attr cn > computers.txt

for /f %%i in (computers.txt) do (
ping -n 1 -w 500 %%i | find "Lost = 0">NUL && ( echo !time! %%i ONline, Launching... & START /B psexec.exe \\%%i -e -d -s -low gpupdate /target:computer /force ) || echo !time! %%i OFFline
)

del computers.txt
echo.

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