Real-World Scripting: Trusted Domain Query Script

You're responsible for tracking information about the domains that your Windows NT resource domain trusts. The administrators of the trusted domains often forget to notify you about configuration changes until problems occur. Thus, you want to have the trusted domain's PDC and BDC names and IP addresses available for those occasions when you have to troubleshoot user authentication, name resolution, and connectivity problems.

To get the PDC and BDC names, you need to run the Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit's Nltest utility several times. To get the PDC and BDC IP addresses, you need to use the Ping command. Thus, getting the PDC and BDC information manually requires four steps:

If you have more than 10 domains, this procedure takes a while, even if you redirect the Nltest output to a file. Fortunately, you can use an NT shell script, TDQuery.bat, to automate this monotonous task. This script uses the For command to run Nltest and Ping against all the PDCs and BDCs. The For command parses the output from a command and uses that output as input for the next command. The script includes some error-detection code that handles unavailable server names and addresses. The script puts the domain and IP address information it gathers in an online report called TDQuery.html, which Screen 1 shows. In the report, the PDCs are in blue text for easy identification. Although Screen 1 doesn't show the color difference, the PDCs are the first entry in each domain.

Listing 1 contains an excerpt from TDQuery.bat. You'll find the entire script on the Win32 Scripting Journal Web site. TDQuery.bat includes line-by-line comments to help you understand the code. In addition, you can check out my two-part series "Scriptwriting Methodology" (March and April 1999), which discusses in detail how to use the For command in scripts to produce online reports.

Here are the steps to get TDQuery.bat working.