How to Document Servers with SYDI - Part 2 of 3

The Output Options

SYDI has two output options; one for saving the report and another to choose which format to use.

-o Output to file, specify a path and filename and use quotation marks if there’s a space in the path. Remember to give your file an .xml extension if you’re using the XML format and a .doc extension for the Word format.

-e This is to choose the export format, the default is -ew (Word), to change to XML use -ex.

To create an XML report you would use:

cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -oServer1.xml -ex [enter]

This will create an XML file that you can open in a browser.

XML Options

You might have noticed that the XML file you created didn’t look that great when viewed in your favorite browser. The reason is that you’re just looking at the raw XML file.

To view a style sheet, use the -s option. I generally use the -sh option which uses the html style sheet included in SYDI. For advanced users there is a -st option where you can specify a style sheet you have created on your own.

Lets test it again:

cscript.exe sydi-server.vbs -oServer1.xml -ex -sh [enter]

In order to view this file with a browser you will need the serverhtml.xsl and sydi-html-styles.xsl to be located in the same directory. These files are in the XML subdirectory of SYDI-Server. Copy the Server1.xml file you just created to that directory and open the file in a browser. Alternatively you can copy all of these files to another directory.

What Other Options do you have?

To be honest, you don’t have that many. The options that are left are -v to check the version of your script; this will check the SYDI website and see if a later version is available (I might remove this option).

The last option is -d for debug, if something fails to run as you expect it might be because of a bug in SYDI. The -d option is useful to troubleshoot these scenarios.

What if You Have More Than One computer?

So you want to run SYDI against multiple computers, it’s easy enough to write a batch file that does it for you. However, in the Tools directory there is a script called sydi-wrapper.vbs. A little “gotcha” is that you have to edit the script for it to work, but don’t panic; there isn’t any voodoo involved. Just open the script in notepad and scroll down to this section:

‘ Gathering Options
‘ WMI - Everything enabled by default
WMIOPTIONS=”-wabefghipPqrsSu”
‘ Registry - Everything enabled by default
REGISTRYOPTIONS=”-racdlp”

‘ Export Options
‘EXPORTFORMAT=”word” ‘ For Microsoft Word
EXPORTFORMAT=”xml” ‘ For XML

‘ Location Options
‘ Location of SYDI-Server.vbs
SYDISERVER=”C:\scripts\sydi-server.vbs”
OUTPUTDIRECTORY=”C:\scripts\Output files\”
LOGDIRECTORY=”C:\Scripts\Log Files\”
TIMEOUT=”600″ ‘ How many seconds you have to wait until a computer-scan is aborted hasn’t been tested.

‘ Other options, check sydi-server.vbs -h for help
‘ Uncoment/Change One of the below
OTHEROPTIONS=”-sh” ‘ For HTML Stylesheet on XML output
‘OTHEROPTIONS=”-b10″ ‘ Base Font size of 12
‘ End Of Settings

You will recognize the -w and -r options, unlike SYDI-Server this script defaults to XML (as it should). What you must change in order to get this to work are the values for SYDISERVER, OUTPUTDIRECTORY and LOGDIRECTORY. If you want to you can change the TIMEOUT value too, however it might not do you any good. That feature seems to have taken time out.

I wasn’t sure this was a good way to implement the script. The reason you have to edit the script is so that you won’t have to write such long commands later on in order to get it working.

Anyway, the remaining options are -u and -p for username and password when you connect to the machines. Then there are the gathering options or source options.

-t Reads from a text file, the computers listed in the text file should be separated by line or comma. To use this option:

cscript.exe sydi-wrapper.vbs -tAllMyComputers.txt

-d This is to get computers from a flat domain (NT4 style) to connect to all the computers in the domain you specify. A word of warning though, I’m told Heaven will be closing the gates for people who use NT4 much longer (you might have to break in as it is).

-a Active Directory, if you just run the script with -a it will connect to the active directory domain where you’re machine is located. Your other option is to specify an LDAP container. SYDI-Server will then scan all computers under this container (except for the ones with disabled computer accounts).

A few examples:

cscript sydi-wrapper.vbs -aDC=exibice,DC=com
cscript sydi-wrapper.vbs -a”OU=Member Servers,DC=exibice,DC=com”

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An Eagles View

After running sydi-wrapper you might have ended up with a whole lot of XML files. To give you a quick overview I’ve included a script for just this purpose. Also in the Tools directory is the sydi-overview.vbs script. It accepts one argument, -x, you will want to point this to the output directory you specified in sydi-wrapper. I have created a batch file which reads:

cscript.exe sydi-overview.vbs -x\\fileserver\net$\sydi\output

Running the script requires that you have Microsoft Excel installed on your machine. The script will parse all the XML files and start to populate the cells in Excel. The script will create six sheets. Computers with basic information about all your computers, WMI Programs is a list of all software installed by Windows Installer, Reg Programs are the ones found in the Uninstall registry key, Processes tells you what every computer is running. All these can be good to detect rouge programs or processes.

Finally there is the OS distribution pie chart and data source.

Read Part 1
Read Part 3

Tags: network documentation, server documentation, sydi, how to, tutorial