As promised here is a quick write up on how I am doing security patches for our servers.  Basically I am able to run the script during normal work hours and schedule the patching for the evening.  At night when the patching starts I get email notifications with success/fail information for each server.  I have been using this process for 3 or 4 months now and it’s working great.

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Batch files and scripts are crucial tools for Windows Systems Administrators. Think of the last time that you needed to touch multiple systems in your Windows infrastructure. If you were lucky it involved running a script pulling workstation names from a text file–worse, it could have involved visits to individual systems.  Here lies the problem, the traditional scripting functionality in Windows is robust but the limitations start becoming obvious when you involve multiple remote systems. 

Enter Script Zombie. This powerful tool, provided free of charge by Nerdcentric Software, allows for advanced functions like spawning a script to 10 remote systems at once. The ability to check network connectivity, pull system information, restart systems, remote desktop, and even check the event viewer on a single or many systems with a few clicks.  All of these features without needing a client installation on the remote machine. Continue reading…

From time to time you need a method to create and test for the existence of a zero byte file in your scripting.  I use these files as flags, so that I know if an earlier prerequisite process completed successfully.

Creating the zero byte file is a simple process:

@echo off
echo.
echo – Check to see if the file is already present
echo.
if exist C:\somedirectory\flag.txt goto Halt
echo – Creating flag.txt
type nul>C:\somedirectory\flag.txt

:Halt
echo.
echo – Flag file already present, halting.

So now to check for the flag before completing your dependent process do an “if” statement similar to this:

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