Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Remote Activation of SMS Agent on Client

In an SMS enviroment you must have the SMS Agent running on the client or you can't do anything. In a strickly user enviroment this doesn't matter since the user can't turn it off, but if you have a user that has admin rights to his/her machine then they have the power to turn you off. Finding them is simple enough, look at the computers that haven't sent in an inventory in quite a while, heart beat or other options. The problem is getting that service restarted.

Here is a vbscript that will turn the service back on for a number of computers.
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Const SW_NORMAL = 1
'change comps to match the number of computers in your array
Dim Comps(1)
Comps(0)="computer1"
Comps(1)="Computer2"
for each strComputer in Comps
strCommand = "net start ccmexec"
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
& strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set objStartup = objWMIService.Get("Win32_ProcessStartup")
Set objConfig = objStartup.SpawnInstance_
objConfig.ShowWindow = SW_NORMAL
Set objProcess = objWMIService.Get("Win32_Process")
intReturn = objProcess.Create (strCommand, Null, objConfig, intProcessID)
'remark lines if you don't want to see the success or failure of the program
If intReturn <> 0 Then
Wscript.Echo "Process could not be created." & _
vbNewLine & "Command line: " & strCommand & _
vbNewLine & "Return value: " & intReturn
Else
Wscript.Echo "Process created." & _
vbNewLine & "Command line: " & strCommand & _
vbNewLine & "Process ID: " & intProcessID End If
Next
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This is simple but effective. You can run it manually or set it as a Scheduled Task on the server.
Remember you must have admin rights on the computer to run this, so we are talking about an local admin account or domain admin.