Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

[Guest]

I'm needing to generate a list of servers that have a particular service installed (in any state) and so I'm again braving SystemTools Exporter Pro (v1.2 Beta Rev 'F') and have again found it to be the most complicated and unintuitive tool I've ever encountered. I really find it hard to believe it's from the same company that produced Hyena...

Anyway, I digress...

The environment is a Mixed Mode NT4/Win2K/Win2K3 Domain with AD.

In Exporter I've created a Windows 2000/2003 Domain Object

In the Properties, under the Services tab, I've selected 'Export Services' and selected 'Services Only', 'Active and Inactive', and defined a file with the name of the service I want to find.

In the General tab I've tried both 'get computers from Windows browse list' and the other option under the Retrieval method along with setting a Filter (PDC, BDC, NT Server).

I find in all circumstances it tries to ping every domain computer. If I were to let it continue it would take hours..

I've also found that the log file being created that is correctly listing the services and service state doesn't contain the server name!

I must being doing something, possibly multiple things wrong, so would appreciate any help, preferably step-by-step instructions on how to achieve the desired result which would be a list of server names that has the particular service installed on it.

Thanks in advance

[cmccullough]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

I'm not able to duplicate this, so send a copy of your Configuration File to [email protected]. You'll find the path to it on Configuration->Properties.

To add the computer name to that export go to Configuration->Properties->Services. Click on Customize Output Columns and click on Insert Symbol. Select Object_Name and click OK.

[kstanush]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

I've like to know what exactly about Exporter Pro is difficult to understand or non-intuitive.

We are in the process of updating the documentation to go along with the extensive changes that we made to v1.2, but our #1 problem is noone reads the documentation. For most things that Exporter needs to do, there should not be a big need to read the documentation anyway.

So...I'd like to know what elements of Exporter Pro are hard to understand.

Thanks for any insight.

[Guest]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

I have some trouble with it also. I think I'm having problems with selecting objects to be "reported on". Maybe its the basic "object view", (which I never used), that is giving me problems.

[Guest]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

Kevin,

The first thing I did was work through the documentation but the layout is geared more for a "explain what each screen object is" and includes little to no "you want to achieve XYZ, here's what you have to do" type examples let alone how to really use the product as a whole.

One application interface aspect that constantly makes no sense to me is that after you create your initial object, if you right-click the object and select Properties you get the properties of that object (ie. the 4 fields) but to actually start defining the info you want to extract you go to the Configuration menu and select Properties.

Insofar as getting the Server name into the Service export, having to click "Insert Symbol" isn't very intuitive for mine. Maybe "Insert Additional Fields" would be more obvious?

Anyway, I still can't seem to stop Exporter from wanting to ping the entire domain even after creating a New Object Grouping that only contained the 3 OUs that have our servers and DCs in them. I'll email the config file through for further analysis.

[kstanush]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

We plan to address the documentation problems soon by offering examples. At least you read the documentation...

The reason that we don't put the export properties on the object itself is because that would imply that you could export different things for each object, and that is not really possible. Or, if you added multiple objects, you certainly would not want to configure the export settings for each one. We are considering changing the Properties around so that you can set the export properties for the different TYPE of objects, ie computers, printers, domains, etc., but don't know if that would make things more confusing or not. It would at the minimum, make more dialogs, and that is never a good thing.

If you have not joined the beta group (join by sending a blank email to [email protected]) we've made a significant number of changes to Exporter Pro, and its now easier to see which objects are active, and what is configured to be exported. We also will send out a new beta tomorrow that will offer the option in Hyena to run either the old exporter (exporter.exe) or the new Exporter (stexport.exe). We are also working on a method to allow objects to be selected in Hyena and sent directly to Exporter, so that you could, for example, have a configuration that exported drive space named "Drive Space Export", and just select the computers in Hyena, select Tools->Exporter Pro->Export Selected Objects... and press Enter. We think that we can add this in a few days.

We've also removed the "Insert Symbol" button in tomorrow's beta, as noone understood what it did or meant and it caused too many problems. So that option is gone. The common elements to the output, server, domain, etc. are now always displayed in the available field list.

I think that we have most of the problems worked out with the "ping the entire world" problem, but I could be wrong. I'd like to know if you are using the beta version or the Exporter version that comes with Hyena v5.5. We did patch v5.5 to fix some of these problems, but the beta has even better control over this feature.

Exporter will (should) only get the list of computers from the OUs if it sees that you want to export something from a computer (disk space, shares, etc.). If you only have OUs in the Exporter object list, then Exporter can ohly get the computers that are actually in the OUs that you have added, as it uses AD to get the computers from AD objects (domains, OUs).

If you want, you can email me the files now and I'll look at them, but you may want to try the beta if you are not already in case a bug is in the release build.

Thanks for your comments. As you can see by the time on this post, we are hard at work fixing these problems.

[This message has been edited by kstanush (edited 01-29-2004).]

[Guest]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

OK, well I've stopped the thing from pinging every device in the domain. Problem was my own - I had another Object active as well as the one I was working on.

Still coming to grips with this

[kstanush]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

What was the other object ? A domain ?

[Guest]

Re: Exporting list of servers with a particular service installed

Yep