VBscript & Active Directory and printers ? (continued)

As I posted earlier, I tried working around some limitations in Microsoft’s Active Directory by teaching the script some intelligence.

But, since we recently started using Thin Clients, all the stuff I did with the fancy vbs was just a waste-of-time. Turns out, Windows XP Embedded doesn’t work quite the same as a “normal” Windows XP (that’s where I tested the script on), and it simply dies when running the WMI Query. Bollocks.

So I switched back, utilizing a shortcut in Startup, but pointing to the shortened vbs (see below) instead of the ugly batch file someone wrote.

But even that doesn’t work all the time, I still have to figure out why.

VBscript & Active Directory and printers ?

Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it’s less ugly than the batch script, trust me).

As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users (as in you can’t put a startup script onto an OU, which is going to map the printers). So as we store users and the computes in different OU’s in our Active Directory (we do have about 15.000 students), I can’t apply the printer.vbs to the users OU directly either, unless I implement some intelligence into the script itself.

And that’s basically what I did. Since different pools at the university have different DNS suffixes (like pools.rz.barfoo.org, that our or pools.fmz.barfoo.org) and we only want them students to have our printers when they logon at our pool, I just made the script to get the DNS DomainName of the current active interface and compare it against a given pattern.