Having written SYDI from scratch, I know it inside and out. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ve managed to communicate how SYDI works in an efficient way. The readme file included in SYDI is far from perfect. While people in this line of business can usually figure out how it works, others will just ignore reading the manual anyway. In this how-to I will go through the basics of how SYDI-Server works and then describe how I use SYDI-Server.
Getting the Software
You probably have the software already, but just in case. Download it from the SYDI website, or if you love this site and don’t want to leave it no matter what: you can download it from here. This guide is written for SYDI-Server 2.0, if there is a newer version when you read this, don’t worry; it should be useful anyway. Just be sure to check the changelog.txt file for new features.
Unzip the file to your target directory.
Running SYDI in default mode
To see what the software does, open a command prompt and navigate to your sydi directory. This step requires you to have Microsoft Word installed on your computer. Type the command:
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs [enter]
A message box appears and asks you which host you want to target, the default is localhost. You can select another host if you have administrative access on that machine. Though for now, just press enter.
In the command prompt window you will now see that SYDI starts to gather information about your machine. Soon a Word document is created and SYDI writes the information gathered into the document.
Take a look at the document. Not all this information will be relevant to you and you can remove the parts you don’t want by reading further. Close Word, or save the file it if you want to.
The Options
To view the available options use the help command (-h):
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -h [enter]
Options in five categories will be listed; Gathering, Output, Word, XML and Other. In reality there are only two, Gathering and Output.
Gathering the Information
Breaking down the gathering option we have five different arguments -w for WMI options, -r for Registry options and -u and -p for username and password if you want to connect to a different user. Finally we have the -t option where you specify which host you want to target against.
Looking closer at the -w argument from the help menu (-h) you could see that SYDI defaults to using -wabefghipPqrsSu, meaning everything gathered from the WMI providers will be included.
You cannot remove everything from the report, but let’s create a document without all the extra information. Run:
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -w [enter]
As you can see the report created is much shorter than the previous one. We have removed the optional WMI providers, but we still have the basic ones and the information coming from the Registry.
To choose which options you want, just check the help menu and see what they mean. If we want to add Bios Information, Printers and Services we would run:
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -wbps [enter]
This way you can pick and choose the options you want. The Registry switch works the same way. For an even smaller report you can run:
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -w -r [enter]
Now you can add the registry options that you want. Please note though that a lot of the “Computer Roles” are gathered from the Windows Components, so if you want these roles you must have the Windows Components in your report (-rc).
Using the -t option removes the message box asking you which host you want to target. A few examples of using the -t switch:
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -tServer1
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -tDC1
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -tWebServer
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -t192.168.0.10
The user and password options should work as you would expect them to, if they don’t: report the bug to me 
Word Options
As you’ve seen, sydi-server defaults to writing output to Word. The reason for this is so that you can get a quick overview of what the script can collect without having to do any tricks. Having said that, I only use the Word option to get a quick view of a machine, later I throw away the document. I always use the XML format which I later convert to a Word document, more on that later. Even though you won’t use the Word options much we’ll just take a quick look at them to see what you can do, it won’t be a total waste as a few of the options are used by another script called ss-xml2word.vbs.
-b is for the border of the tables created in the document. As you might have noticed there isn’t any borders by default (when you print the document). You can use all borders you have installed in Word. To test it, type:
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -b”Table Contemporary” [enter]
-f is if you want different font sizes, the default font size for the text is 12. To change it, use:
cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -f8
-d tells SYDI not to display Word until the entire report is written. Using the -d option makes the process go faster. Also if you want to save the file (-o option, more on that later), you might not want to see Word at all. For example if you are running a scheduled task you don’t want a GUI to be loaded.
-n will remove all the text inside the brackets, such as “Logical location: [provide info: Server VLAN 2]“. This way you won’t have a bad conscience about not completing the documentation. But as I have already stated, the whole idea of sydi-server writing directly to word is obsolete. If you start changing the document after it is created and want to run SYDI again your changes will be lost, or you will have to cut and paste them to the new document. There is a way around this though (hint: continue reading!).
-T This is if you want to specify a corporate Word Template file (.dot), which enables you to choose which fonts you want to have as well as their size. This way you can get your “look and feel” in the document.
Tags: network documentation, server documentation, sydi, how to, tutorial
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Awesome! many thanks for putting this together, Patrick. Any chance of rolling it all together into a word doc for download / distribution? or shall I stop being a cheeky bugger and copy and paste it myself? (with your permission, of course)
Tim/.
Tim, I don’t have any immediate plans on distributing a Word document. If you want one for yourself, you are free to copy and past (or write a script that does this
)
What did you think of the ss-xml2word script?
This is a very useful and extremelly easy to use tool. Thanks Patrick for creating something that it actually helps a network administrator. I will tell my colleagues about this cool gem…Thanks again
An excellent tool and a great “How To” – thank you very much.
Just a tip – it might pay to note that the tool writes to the ‘currently active’ Word document window so if you open a Word doc while it is writing it will start spitting the output into that doc
.
Thanks!
How about an output to Wiki code?
what level of access rights do you need to run this…we are thiking of giving this as a task for our Graduate Assistant
thanks…awesome program…we LOVE it here
amazing….
wiki code would be the icing on the cake..
thank you…
Great tool, I can not believe what it does. I will start documenting all my servers right now.
Thank you very much for such a great tool!!!
Hey,
This is a great tool. However, I just wanted to find out if I can ues this over a network from a Vista Ultimate machine to Windows NT Server 4.0 to get information from the Server? I am in the process of rolling over from NT Server to SBS 2003. Thanks.
Jason – NT4 isn’t really supported but some parts work. Though you have to install the WMI provider for NT4. If you do a search on Microsofts download site you should find it.
Patrick
Thanks for your hard work. Network documentation is difficult enough and it can become expensive. Thanks for this tool. It makes life easier.
Kevin
This tool is fabulous, thank you for creating it. Most machines create a 23 page document, two machines create a 230 page document. About 200 pages of startup commands. Where are startup commands created, the registry? Where should I investigate. to try to understand what is happening?
Milton – They might be under the default user account in the registry. Some vendors like IBM can have quite a few startup commands…
Fantastic work. Accomplished in minutes what would have been hours worth of tedious work. THANK YOU!
D.
Patrick,
This a great tool and will make short work of documenting my desktop lab environment. Though I am not getting the credentials promt I was expecting. So far it only works localy. What I get in the command promt when attempting to run on a remote host is “access denied”. Should I get a promte or should that be in the command line also?
Thanks.
Patrick,
I just wanted to take the opportunity to chime in and say thank you for creating this tool. I had finally decided to the bite bullet and tackle the task of documenting the network. I found this tool and your site doing a web search. The initial results and flexibility of this tool are going to make a tedious (but necessary) task tolerable.
Good morning,
I have a question in regards to running the “SYDI” script. I’m able to run the “SYDI” script using the following syntax “cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -tLANOPPS -uxxxx –pxxxxxxx” and retrieve all the data.
My question is how to run the script to automatically dump the information as a (.doc or .xls) can you please provide me with the proper syntax I’ve tried using the help but I’m not quite understanding all the switches.
By the way Great script.
Thanks,
How do you gather harddrive and partition Info?
Don B and Doug Brescia Thanks
Dan Ryan There is no authentication prompt, you can run it with a user who has access or use the -u and -p parameters.
Dale Perhaps this page can help you: ss-xml2word.vbs
Jim If you run the script locally and don’t have administrative access the disk information won’t show up.
Is there a way to also add what Programs are installed, could be as simple as listing whats on the Start – All Programs menu. And also all Scheduled Tasks?
Excellent tool. I was wondering though, as I need to check all of my companies PC’s around europe to see which are or are not ok to use Windows 7 all i need is the first bit of information listed under hardware plateform. Is there any way to get this to only return that information and none of the rest?
Thanks in advance.
Also one more question,,,can this be used to get information from multiple machines at the same time???
Thanks
Andy – Take a look at this site for how to get a more compact report:
http://sydiproject.com/howto/limiting-the-length-of-a-sydi-report/
Concerning running the script against multiple machines. Continue reading the rest of this guide and you’ll find out.
You should look at the Microsoft Assessment and Planning tool 5.0 — MAP 5.0 — It will give you a comprehensive report on which machines can take Windows 7.
Dave Kawula
Principal Consultant
TriCon Technical Services Inc.
This is a very good tool im impressing how this generate the report…
thanks for that and i hope that you keep working on it…
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