Removing CA eTrust 8.x AntiVirus through a script

I had a problem where i needed to remove the AV off our servers on a large scale and found that the manual process for this was quite time consuming.

Because CA sold the antivirus business to TotalDefence, a lot of the documentation disappeared from their website so it took some playing around with how to do it successfully.

The batch file does the following steps:

  1. Stops all eTrust services.
  2. Kills the processes just in case they are lingering
  3. runs MSIEXEC uninstall of the software, in the order that they should be. ITM Agent first, then iTechnology iGateway.
  4. Prompts to tell you to reboot machine

The script is relatively simple, and quite rudimentary –

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Decomission a Windows 2003 or 2008 Domain Controller

To decommission an Active Directory Domain Controller (Windows Server 2003/2008) is a fairly straightforward task so long as you make sure nothing is relying on that server specifically. I will cover off the demotions steps (fairly easy) but I will go through a checklist (and how-to) of gotchas that you might get caught out when doing this.

UPDATE: 27/09/2019 – Quick update to say that this is definitely the most popular comment on my blog. Thank you all for the all the comments, and please do keep them coming. The more comments i get, the more likely i will start to write articles again.

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Computer name conventions

Computer naming conventions are like creating an Active Directory hierarchy – there is no wrong or right. Its more about what best suits your current and future needs. Over the years my naming conventions have evolved and below I will document my currently preferred method. First we will look at the technical constraints when naming them, and what characters I recommend using.

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Automatically generate description field for computers in Active Directory

Having worked in help-desk roles in the past I know the importance of knowing which user has logged onto which computer. Its simple stuff really, but unless you have 3rd party systems like System Center 2012 (SC12) or client agents, its either hard or time consuming to find out the relation between users and computers. What we needed was an easy way to find out what the last logged on user was for every machine.

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How to run domain admin tasks without being logged in as an administrator

My problem was I did not want to always “Run As…” all my important admin programs and mmc snap-ins all day because i didnt log on as an admin. It simply took up alot of my time and it frustrated me. What i really needed was a way to automatically (and securely) load all my administrative programs without having to enter any user names or passwords. Well i have a solution for anyone that had the same pain as i did.

The solution started off with the Free Elevation PowerToy found here where i used the elevation files in their original way, however i altered the original registry keys that go in the context menus along with the elevate.vbs to cater for certain anomalies.

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How to configure a KMS server in Windows Server 2008 R2

Well I have had the pleasure of setting up a KMS server in our environment, and found that the documentation from Microsoft is somewhat confusing. In light of this I will write the steps I used to configure the first KMS server in our organisation for use with Windows Server, Windows client and Microsoft Office activation. These steps will only include the installation of 1 KMS server.

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