a blog on technology in the real world

Here’s a quick one-line script I’ve been using to clean up some old computer accounts in active directory. It requires the dsquery and dsrm tools from the Server 2003 Admin Pack or the Remote Server Administration Toolkit.

@for /f %%a in ('DSQUERY COMPUTER -NAME *%1') do (dsrm %%a)

Save that in as a batch file and it’ll query Active Directory for computers including the argument passed.  Here’s an example with a naming structure where we have the last 4 digits of the MAC address in the name for uniqueness.

C:\>adrm.cmd 6736
C:\>(dsrm "CN=LABPC6736,OU=Labs,DC=yakk0,DC=org" )
Are you sure you wish to delete CN=LABPC6736,OU=Labs,DC=yakk0,DC=org (Y/N)? y
dsrm succeeded:CN=LABPC6736,OU=Labs,DC=yakk0,DC=org

Part one of my home computing infrastructre is done. I am moving from the free VMWare Server to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (thanks to my Technet subscription). VMWare Server is nice, but a little slow. Hyper-V is something I’ve wanted to play with for a while, but I was also considering VMWare ESXi, which is a free version of their enterprise ESX server. I settled on Hyper-V moved everything off my server onto my Drobo.

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It’s a new year, so I felt like it was time to do some major housecleaning on my systems.I started with my bookmarks. It might not seem like much, but I’ve been carrying the same bookmarks.html file from system to system since I first started using Netscape in 96-97. It’s gone from Netscape to IE, with some time spent in Opera along the way, and currently lives in Firefox. I’ve kept it in sync on my various computers with Google Browser Sync, and now with Foxmarks. There were a ton of dead sites in there, as well as many, many duplicate entries. I figure the dupes are from problems importing and exporting, as well as when I used browser sync. When I started I had nearly 2000 bookmarks, and now I have under 200.

Next up on my cleaning list is probably my macbook pro which is under 6 months old, but has a lot of junk on it. I’m also working on my Drobo, trying to get everything off it so I can increase the max capacity on it. It’s got 715GB used out of 1TB available, and I got another big drive for Christmas to put in there.