You have probably heard the term WMI, but may not be familiar with the power behind it. If you are a Windows Administrator or support technician WMI can be one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal. In this article we look at the basics of WMI and how to perform WQL queries to retreive information.
I thought it was about the window manager : http://wmii.de/wmii/. It would be great to have an article about it !
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1622
enjoy
-Nex6
WMI exposes so much via COM, you can knock up a vbscript to administer practically anything on one or remote systems, or even local machines in login scripts etc. I recently used it to write a short script to query all the network interfaces and DNS suffixes to perform a network-wide change. Very, very useful stuff and well worth the time it takes to get to grip with it.
With Server 2003 AD, you can also use WMI to target group policy – a very powerful tool. Rather than applying based on security filtering, you can apply for e.g. based on amount of memory, operating system version, free hard disk space and all sorts of things.
Active Directory, IMO, is one thing Microsoft hit the nail on the head with in Server 2003. Obviously there are still gripes, but it is a pleasure (95% of the time!) to administer.