Real-World Scripting: Creating an ERD Report

You're the administrator of a large Windows NT Server farm. One of your most labor-intensive tasks is keeping your large collection of Emergency Repair Disks (ERDs) up-to-date. Several times you've needed a more current ERD than you had available, and thus the recovery took longer than necessary.

Recently, you installed the Task Scheduler that comes with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 4.0 on all your servers and scheduled rdisk.exe to run regularly. You're concerned that the scheduled ERD information update isn't occurring on all the servers. Thus, you want to develop an NT shell script that determines the age of the ERD information on each server and displays this information in an HTML report.

Shortly after you write your ERD script, you receive a request from the administrator in charge of backups. Someone had remotely installed new backup software on the clients, and now the backups are failing. In his request, he asks you to create a script that

You realize that with minor modifications, you can use your ERD script to fulfill the administrator's request. Leveraging the code you've written for the ERD task, you use the Set command to assign the target filename and default and nondefault target directories. More important, you use the Set command to assign a comparison date (i.e., the date you want to compare the file dates against) as an environment variable. When the script runs, the system compares the file dates against the comparison date you specify. If the dates don't match, the system displays the offending files in red type in the HTML report. If a server is unreachable or the specified directory isn't in the default location, the script displays N/A for that particular file.

The finished script, FileDateReport.bat, obtains the date of any file or directory on the servers you specify in the input file servers.txt. Figure 1 shows an example input file. If you set a comparison date, the script also tests those dates against the comparison date you specify.

Listing 1 contains an excerpt from FileDateReport.bat. You can find the entire script on the Win32 Scripting Journal Web site (http://www.winntmag.com/newsletter/scripting). I configured this script to gather only the dates of ERD data in the repair directory. Screen 1, page 10, shows an example ERD report that you receive from running this configuration of FileDateReport.bat. The script includes comments to help you reconfigure the script if you want to compare dates. Here are the steps to get FileDateReport.bat working: