Some time ago I received request to automate file transfer between FTP server and Development systems. Both, FTP server and Development system, are Windows-based. FTP server was running FTP over SSL only, so that automatically eliminated built-in Windows FTP command-line app. As I was using WinSCP in the past decided to do quick check if it is possible to use it in batch mode, so I can create script and run it on Windows Task Scheduler to automate whole process.

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RANCID is a great automation tool which allows you to collect configuration from network devices and store in repository with version control (CVS or SVN). In this article I will show you how to install RANCID and prepare to work on openSUSE 11.4 with subversion as repository for configs.

Having repository with network devices configuration might be also part of disaster recovery planning as in case of failure it will be easy to pull recent configuration from repository and apply on replacement router or switch.

To demonstrate commands I’m using copy&paste from PuTTY while executing step-by-step what is described in this article.

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If you need to capture configuration of Windows-based DHCP server for documentation or review purposes, this might be handy:

netsh -r lab-dc-01 dhcp server dump > C:\dhcp-lab-dc-01.txt

NOTE: lab-dc-01 in example command is name of the Windows server which has DHCP installed.

Example DHCP server dump from Windows Server 2008 R2 you can see here. It contains one scope for subnet 172.16.90.0/24, option for DNS and default gateway defined.

Here is quick script which connects to Active Directory, reads all computer accounts from Organization Unit (OU) indicated in script and then pings all computers found in that OU. It might be handy if all server accounts are located in one OU.

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Some time ago I had to transfer SQL Server databases from remote retail locations to central system. At that time whol einfrastructure was operating on Microsoft SQL server 2000 and link in remote locations was 128kb/s ISDN. At that time I thought that the best idea will be backup database to local hard disk on SQL server, RAR it and FTP compressed backup of SQL database to headquater. It did work quite well. So, below is a script I scheduled to be run as part of scheduled job defined on SQL Server Agent.

Before script will be used few things have to be customized:

• location for database backups – @archive_path – default: F:\Backup
• location of WinRAR application – @archive_cmd – default: C:\Program Files\WinRAR
• IP address of FTP server – default: 192.168.10.120
• Username and password for FTP user – default: dbupload/password
• Folder on FTP server for backup upload – default: Site_Backup

As there might ba many remote sites uploading backups, each site can have different folder for data transfer.

Here is script to backup SQL Server database and trasfer backup to FTP server:

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Script I used as computer statup script pushed via GPO. It renames local Administrator to Admin and sets password for Admin account to one specified in script.
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