And so, yesterday I discovered that since all our sites are now part of 
one domain, that means all the login scripts are jumbled up together. 
(Remind me... WHY are we embarking on this unecessary complexity?)

Clearly I'm going to have to rename the UK ones to disambiguate them 
from the rest. However, while I'm looking around, I had a look at the 
logon scripts used by some of the other sites...

Now, the UK uses 4 different logon scripts, depending on what you need 
access to. Each script is an MS-DOS batch file that looks something like 
this:

   @ECHO OFF

   NET USE J: \\uk-bigbox\department /persistent:no
   NET USE R: \\uk-bigbox\results /persistent:no
   NET USE M: \\uk-bigbox\management /persistent:no

The longest login script is 7 lines long. Basically each group of people 
have access to more or fewer network drives, and when I create a user 
account, I set it to run the appropriate script at logon.

I had a look at the script run by the people at HQ. JESUS CHRIST!! o_O

Fact #1: It's VB. (!!) I didn't even know you could *do* that!

Fact #2: It's 318 lines long. (!!!!!!)

I don't even want to guess how long it takes these people to log in... 
Between starting up the entire VB subsystem and running several hundred 
lines of code through an interactive interpretter, it can't be very fast!

As best as I can tell (I don't really comprehend VB), this script does 
the following:

1. Figure out if M$ Office is installed. (??)
2. Load the user's real name data out of Active Directory. (?!)
3. Reconfigure the User Name and Initials data in M$ Office (?!!!!)
4. Determine which security groups the user has been assigned to in 
Active Directory.
5. Iterate through that list, and call about 30 different subroutines 
based on group membership. (!!)
6. Each subroutine checks for the existence of various network drive 
mappings, deletes them if they exist, and then maps them.
7. Delete some old shortcuts from the desktop and copy some new ones.
8. Quit. (At last!!)

The entire thing is one giant monolithic blob of code. And it's not even 
like there's a subroutine for the "check if this drive is mapped, delete 
the existing mapping, map it to this" procedure. It's actually been 
cut-and-pasted 25 times or something. (The REM statements at the top 
indicate that the script was auto-generated by some scripting tool - but 
modifications further down indicate that the script has since been 
edited by hand...)

Suddenly Mr IT's "I want there to be one login script for each site" 
makes chilling sense... o_O

(Hmm, I wonder... Does having a VB login script work for Windows NT?)

Clearly they're mapping *way* more drives than we are; the listing shows 
at least a dozen, whereas we have a maximum of about 5. But even so, 
what they're doing seems like massive, massive overkill to me...

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