TechRepublic
recently asked members to submit their favorite Network Administration scripts
for possible publication. One of the first to make a submission was Kurt
Hudson. For his effort, Kurt earned $100 and the satisfaction of seeing his
script published on the Internet.

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Here in his own words and code is Kurt’s admin script:

I developed
this script (Listing A) to help a
network administrator colleague to modify the Lotus Notes notes.ini file for
all of the client computers in his enterprise network. The script was
distributed through Group Policy as a startup script to ensure that all client
computers would have their .ini files updated to reflect a new notes database that
my colleague created.

I
originally did not comment any of my code, but I just spent a little while
explaining almost every line or section in this file. I think this will be
educational and useful for network administrators who need to modify system
files (especially for programs that still rely on .ini files). I hope you agree.

Listing A

‘ This is an example script that can be used to modify an ini file in
‘ a Windows client operating system. I developed this script to modify
‘ the Notes.ini. However, it could be used to modify any file on a
‘ client computer.

‘ Defining constants – meaningful names that replace values
Const ForReading = 1, ForWriting = 2, ForAppending = 3
Const TristateUseDefault = -2, TristateTrue = -1, TristateFalse = 0

‘ Declaring variables that are used to perform functions in later lines
Dim orgfile, newfile, fs, strLine

‘ Setting variables to perform built in functions

‘ The variable fs will be set to create a file system object
set fs = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

‘ The variable orgfile is used to open the existing notes.ini file
set orgfile = fs.OpenTextFile(“notes.ini”)

‘ The variable newfile is used to create a new file names notes.tmp
‘ This file will create a notes.tmp file that has the existing values
‘ in the current notes.ini file as well as the replacement values
‘ that I need in the new notes.ini so this will become the new notes.ini
set newfile = fs.CreateTextFile(“notes.tmp”)

‘ Copies the existing notes.ini file to a new file named notes.old
fs.CopyFile “notes.ini”, “notes.old”

‘ The following section reads the entire notes.ini file looking for
‘ the NAMES section and replaces it with a new text stream

Do while not orgfile.AtEndofStream
      strLine = orgfile.ReadLine
      select Case strLine
            case “NAMES=names.nsf, mdc.nsf, itcontacts.nsf”
                  newfile.WriteLine “NAMES=names.nsf, newmdc.nsf, itcontacts.nsf”
            case else
                  newfile.WriteLinestrLine
      end select

‘ the loop statement causes this section run until the entire file is evaluated
loop

‘ the following statements close the original and new files
orgfile.close
      set orgfile = nothing
newfile.close
      set newfile = nothing

‘ Remove the existing notes.ini
fs.DeleteFile “notes.ini”
‘ Rename the notes.tmp file notes.ini to make it the new notes.ini file
fs.MoveFile “notes.tmp”, “notes.ini”