Topic: Abe's contrib - Batch: Local Hostnames and Addresses

[daley]

Hi All,

Has anyone implemented the Abe loveless (tech-geeks.org) contrib - "Batch: Local Hostnames and Addresses", which is designed for those who needs to add a large number of local hosts to the HostNames and Addresses panel of SME server.

My understanding the current SME has already been featured it, if yes, is it really a need to incorporate this batch-host into the SME server?

kindly advise.

regards,
daley

[Abe Loveless]

Actually, I haven't looked at 5.6 very closely yet.  As far as I know 5.5 and below did not have a built-in option included.  The contrib works great where I've used it.

[daley]

hi abe,

thanks, i still don't really get how it works, how do we really apply and benefits it to the SME server? would you mind to enlighten me pls?

regards,
daley

[Abe Loveless]

Well, the average user may not use this much.  I wrote it when a school district that I work with wanted to use the internal DNS entries to navigate their internal servers/workstations.

So, by adding their machine names and IP addresses to the Localhosts panel, you can go to any machine and browse the network (Windows Explorer, Internet browser, whatever you want) by machine name, rather than IP address or the netbeui protocol.  Actually, it seems like they had some kind of Inventory program that would scan machines and build an inventory db that needed DNS names.

Rather than entering each wkstn manually, they wanted an import script.  So... I wrote one, based on the actual script used when you add entries manually through the server-manager.

Does that make sense?

[Bill K]

I have used it w/o a hitch for 2 things.  

1) Easily set up email accounts for 60 users in one swell foop.

2) The only real way to easily and completly delete users.

It works!

BK

[Abe Loveless]

Bill, Thanks for the praise.  

Not to confuse anyone... Bill is talking about the batch script to add/delete users available here:

http://www.tech-geeks.org/contrib/loveless/batch_users/

[Bill K]

It has saved me many tedious hours adding users.  I should also add that it can handle up to about 500 users at a time, so break large blocks of users into blocks of ~ 500.
BK