PC Management – Ivan’s cloud and security blog

Removing CA eTrust 8.x AntiVirus through a script

5 January, 202113 October, 2014 by Ivan Dretvic

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:

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

The script is relatively simple, and quite rudimentary –

Managing location based printers in an enterprise environment

18 November, 201315 November, 2013 by Ivan Dretvic

I thought about why managing printing in an enterprise is so frustrating and came to a conclusion that the solutions available (and available to my budget) do not fill end users requirements but IT administrators requirements. Ultimately users what to print something, to the closest printer without having to install printers/drivers or speak to IT, where as IT administrators want to control deployment, configure default settings and centrally control access.

Computer name conventions

26 October, 2012 by Ivan Dretvic

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.

Automatically generate description field for computers in Active Directory

5 January, 20219 October, 2012 by Ivan Dretvic

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.

Automatically set Microsoft Office User Info based on LDAP query

5 January, 202123 June, 2011 by Ivan Dretvic

In our network we have had a problem where a lot of our users never configured their Microsoft Office user details and simply accepted the defaults. In our case it was ‘Admin’ due to our SOE not accommodating for it.

Example of the data I am referring to:

How to configure a KMS server in Windows Server 2008 R2

10 July, 20139 June, 2011 by Ivan Dretvic

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.